SCALE FREE
v1.0.5
By
Patrick Arnesen
* * * * *
COVER ART BY:
Jung Shin
Scale Free
Copyleft 2013 by Patrick Arnesen
Thank you for downloading this free eBook. This book is free in both senses of the word. You may copy, share (please do), print or modify work any way you please, for any purpose you like, without cost, provided you clearly and visibly cite me (Patrick Arnesen) as the author of this original work.
-------- 1 --------
The message startled me as it flashed right into the center of my field of view, as big as a highway billboard at 50 feet. This was a very high priority message. It brushed off all my usual filters even though I had set them to block almost everything. When the message suddenly appeared, I defensively pulled my arms inward; but I was still holding on tight to the tiller that was steering the little tri I was sailing. As luck would have it, I was also surfing a wave toward a white beach with the strong evening wind at my back. The boat rocked violently, pitched hard and performed an uncontrolled jibe. My new course, now perpendicular to the wind, transformed the sail from a power source to a lever, inviting the wind to grab the boat and roll it over, which it did without hesitation. As the boat slowed and rolled, the curl of the wave caught up and completed the coup de grâce. One of the two outer hulls broke off, as did the mast. The water pulled me from my perch on the main hull and rolled me over and over, erasing all sense of up or down.
When I managed to surface it was just in time to see my daughter's boat hit the beach. Emma, giggling, jumped out and hauled her boat a foot or two up the sand. Then she stepped back to enjoy the sight of her father treading water next to the wreckage of his sailboat.
By the time I had dragged my broken boat up onto the beach the message had reduced itself to a postage stamp in my field of view, but was still flashing insistently. I knew of only one type of message that could impose itself so forcefully on its recipient. I asked my daughter to walk herself home along the beach, then reached out and touched the message, signaling it to display its contents.
As I had feared it was a request to present myself at once for a government assignment. In my four years as an upload I had happily been spared such duties. This was perfectly normal. Of the 200,000+ citizens of the polis, only about 1000 or so were needed at any given time to attend to official business. The rest were free to do as they pleased, which for me amounted to raising my daughter in this lovely Polynesian sim and generally having a good time.
The message did not provide much detail. It ordered me to present myself to a Mr. Speer, director of foreign relations, at the earliest opportunity to discuss an urgent matter.
I made the gesture to bring up my interface and punched the command to jump to my house. My field of view shifted instantly from rolling waves and evening sun to stuffed couch pillows and the sweeping views from my living room windows.
I walked to the bedroom and inspected myself in the mirror. Barefoot, deep tan, salt-crusted hair to my shoulders, dressed in a dripping pair of cargo shorts. With some hesitation, I selected a more formal haircut, dialed back the tan and put on a suit. Next I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water.
With a sigh I sent Mr. Speer an instant message requesting a live site visit. Now I had to wait for him to accept. I took my glass out onto the deck and leaned against the railing.
My house (I still have it) is a modern wood and glass affair. Set in a temperate climate, it perches on a steep grassy hillside above the sea. It has a large outdoor deck, designed to offer grand views of the sunset and the waves crashing on the rocks below. In those days, I spent a good deal of my time in the Polynesian sim where I shared a little beach hut with my daughter Emma, and where at night, I would often slip away to Melanie’s hut, so I didn’t come here often on my own. The house was most often used as a work area for Emma’s studies, and I often tagged along to help her. That day, her study-desktop was spread out over the kitchen table, with her books and notes open from the day before.
Emma was twelve. She and I joined the polis when she was eight. As newcomers usually do, we had touristed through the Polis' many sims to take in the sights. One morning we had found a tri on the beach of the Polynesian sim and sailed out onto the warm waters of the lagoon. Emma had perched at the front of the boat with her feet trailing in the water. Near the center of the lagoon a pod of dolphins had spotted us and swum over for a look, easily outpacing our little tri.
I'll never forget the look of delight on Emma's face as she made eye contact with them. The animals were members of one of the pods that had been pulled from the failing ecology of the Pacific. A science team had been assembled to round up as many dolphin pods as could still be found and bring them into the safety of the Polis. Now they live in the rich waters of the Polynesian sim and in a handful of other sims, where they catch fish, raise baby dolphins and delight children.
That day Emma had pleaded "Daddy please can we stay here? I want to live right HERE!"
The warm breeze had played over my face and the blue waters had beckoned. After all the hardship Emma and I had been through, I could find little reason to refuse.
A new message popped into my field of view. Mr. Speer was ready to see me. The message also included a single-use jump link to his office.
-------- 2 --------
I punched the link and popped into the simlet Mr. Speer kept as his office. I found myself standing on the grassy top of a moderately sized foothill. Behind me were the sharp, snow covered peaks of a high mountain range and below in the valley I could see a small village with a central church and bell tower. Small herds of sheep and goats grazed the hillside. Above me hung a mid-morning sun in a blue sky, framed by fluffy clouds. The only thing preventing the scene from devolving into a tired rendition of Swiss pastoral kitsch was the rather unexpected presence of carpets, a desk, chairs, tables, and a stone fireplace, all arrayed on the open, flat top of the hill.
Behind the desk sat an elegant, somewhat elderly looking man in a tailored three piece suit. With his stiff posture and stern expression he looked all the world like a Swiss banker. Maintaining said posture, he gracefully rose and walked around the desk to offer me his hand.
"Mr. Roamer. Thank you very much for responding quickly to my call. I apologize for pulling you so abruptly from your normal routine. Would you like any refreshments; is there anything I can do to make you comfortable?"
"It’s no problem, I'm sure you had good reason. Some coconut juice would be fine, thank you." Mr. Speer gave me a curious glance, then his eyes refocused on an unseen interface. His hands made a few cutting and pointing gestures in the air and then he gestured toward the fireplace, which had a coffee table and two ornate leather chairs in front of it. As I approached, a glass of whiskey materialized on the table, then a coconut with a straw sticking out of it. "Won't you please sit down?"
Mr. Speer settled into the chair across from me and reached for his drink. "Let's see now, you've been with us for four years now, is that right?"
"Yes Sir." I replied, using the honorific reserved for uploads holding an elected office. "I uploaded four years ago with my daughter, Emma, and we've settled quite happily, mostly in Polynesia."
"How old was she when she uploaded, if you don't mind my asking?"
"She was eight at the time."
"That could not have been an easy transition for her. Did you find the support family you were given helpful?"
"Oh yes, they were very good to us. I had just uploaded myself and we were both struggling. We stayed with them for nearly a week. It helped Emma a great deal to have someone other than me to reassure her that what she was going through was normal. If it had just been the two of us alone, I think it would have been much harder."
Mr. Speer smiled and took a sip of his whiskey. "That's good. I'm glad to hear that you and your daughter have made a good life for yourselves here.
Mr. Roamer, I have a temporary position opening up on my staff and your name came to my attention as one of the top candidates. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your professional experience?"
"Please do. But first can you tell me a little about the role I would be playing?"
"Not very much right now, but it will involve handling US and Canadian security inquiries and it may require a fair a degree of tact, which is, I hope, where your skills may come in useful. I see from your career history that you have filled several diplomatic posts for the Canadian government, as well as heading up government relations for a number of major corporations. Is this correct?"
"Yes sir. My last posting was as an analyst for the ambassador to the USA."
"And I also understand that before that you worked as an advisor to the prime minister."
"The former prime minister now I'm afraid, but it all feels like a lifetime ago these days."
"And your formal education was in law and philosophy is that right?"
"Yes sir. I have a graduate degree in philosophy and a law degree from the University of British Columbia."
"You clearly had a very successful career. May I ask why you chose to leave it behind and join this Polis?"
I didn't want to answer this question in any detail. "Personal reasons mostly, involving the death of my wife, and also I believed it was the best choice for my daughter."
"I'm very sorry." Mr. Speer shifted in his chair and continued. "Your associates both from outside and inside the Polis all speak very highly of you. I'm sorry to have to disrupt your life in Polynesia. Hopefully the job I need you for will be brief. Can you help us?"
That was it, I had been recruited. At least the work sounded somewhat interesting. "Mr. Speer, the members of this Polis have been very good to my daughter and me and it would be an honor to serve."
"Thank you. We have received an order to appear before the NASC. I don't know what it's about but I understand that it could be quite serious. I need you to represent the polis in this matter. We have been told to send someone to meet a Mr. Claude Gaudet tomorrow morning. That's where you'll start."
With that we said our farewells and I jumped back to my house for another wardrobe change before heading back to Polynesia. It was time to tell my family I now had a day job.
-------- 3 --------
I materialized at my usual jump point on the beach. It was night and the little winding path through the banana trees to the village was lit by starlight. After a minute's walk I found Melanie and Emma by the fire pit in the center of the loose circle of grass huts we called our village. A few other villagers were there as well, talking and laughing softly. They were reclining on woven mats and pillows, pulled up near the fire. I gave Melanie and Emma quick hugs, then settled onto an empty mat beside them and propped myself up with a pillow. The warmth from the fire felt good.
"So where did you sulk off to after breaking your boat on that wave?" Melanie asked.
"Hmm" I smiled, remembering "I see Emma's filled you in. That was a pretty bad rollover."
"Yeah that wave must have put your boat through the spin cycle. Emma showed me what's left of it on the beach. Looks like you've got a bit of work ahead of you fixing it up."
"Ya, Dad’s boat looked like it was washed up from another island!" Emma piped in. "It'll need a new mast, a new sail and new poles between the hulls!"
"I'll have it out on the water again soon enough" I countered. "Those waves get everyone, sooner or later."
Emma giggled "Well in the meantime you can sail with me, but on my boat I'm the boss and if you don't do what I say I'll feed you to the fish!"
There was another round of gentle laugher. We paused for a while to stare at the fire.
"So where did you go today Jarrod?" Melanie asked.
"Well, actually I got summoned to a job interview. I spread my hands in resignation, "I've been recruited. Looks like I've got a day job."
"As in actual service?" Melanie asked.
"Yup, but it shouldn't take more than a few days I think. A few weeks at most. The bad part is that I have to go outside into the real world tomorrow for a meeting. I hope you won't miss me too much Emma."
"Don't worry Daddy, I'm going over to Sheila's place tomorrow. I'll be ok."
"It's weird imagining you doing actual work." Melanie winked "I mean I've never seen you do any. I hope you still remember how."
"Hmm. Well maybe I'll surprise you." I folded my hands behind my head and looked up at the stars. There was a hint of a new moon. The banana trees shielded the village from the wind off the water and the fire was warm on my face. I turned to look at Emma and Melanie cuddled up together. "Do you guys want to just sleep out here on the mats again tonight?"
-------- 4 --------
I hate going outside. I had only done it twice since uploading. The first time had been just to see what it was like and the second time was to attend the wedding of an old friend, which had turned out to be very awkward. The bodies used by uploads when venturing outside are blatantly synthetic. There is a phenomenon called "Uncanny Alley" that prevents humans from accepting machines that look almost but not quite human. A robot that tries to replicate the skin, lips and eyelashes of a human but doesn't get it exactly right comes across as creepy. Since we can't replicate human bodies to perfection, it's best not to try at all. Thus our robots mimic the human shape with two arms, legs, a head, nose and mouth, but they have a light-blue skin tone. They wear no clothes, have no genitalia or hair, and the skin is perfectly smooth, following simple geometric forms with no ripples of muscle or fat. On the chest is painted the VivraTerra logo.
You can't jump into a robot body the same way you can an avatar in a sim. A robot doesn't have enough computer power to host an uploaded person, and the speed of light prevents remote piloting. The human nervous system was never set up to handle the latency introduced by a remote connection, and though we're no longer human we're still limited by the biological architecture of our uploaded minds. When it had been tried, the "test pilots" had staggered around the lab, suffering extreme vertigo and sea-sickness. To get around this problem we rigged up a solution that allows us to drive the robots but still maintain a degree of separation from the hardware.
A robot has a humanesque face that can portray a passing rendition of human emotions, but beside the eyes there are also 4 more pairs of camera-lenses arrayed around its bald head. A pair on each side, another pair on the back of the head and the last pair on top. This gives the robot a 360 degree field of view, allowing it to gather enough data to reconstruct a 3 dimensional model of its surroundings.
That's why I now found myself walking through a 3d simulation of the robot's environment. Instead of receiving a raw feed of the robot's senses, I was driving it through this sim, with a sophisticated software system translating my actions in the sim to commands for the robot. The process works well enough for basic interaction. But despite the software's valiant efforts, it cannot not completely compensate for the effects of latency, which makes it awkward to perform tasks that require timing and dexterity, such as shaking hands with someone.
-------- 5 --------
It was time to visit Mr. Gaudet.
As before, when I launched the interface I found myself standing in a wall alcove. On each side of me and along the wall on the opposite side of the room were a couple of dozen motionless robots. A few alcoves were empty but it was clear that these robots were more than enough to meet the needs of the whole polis. Uploads don't care to go out much.
I stepped out of the room into an opulently decorated hallway with deep purple carpeting. To the left and right of me were meeting rooms, for use when receiving human guests. Then the hallway opened out into a large lobby. There were clusters of couches arranged around coffee tables, a grand piano in the corner next to an open space meant to act as a reception area for parties. Along the edge of one wall were tables and chairs and a door opening into a large kitchen where uploads could cook for their human friends and family. These amenities had featured prominently in the Polis brochure I had read four years ago. The place felt like it hadn't been used in months.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped out onto the street for the first time in years. It was summer in Vancouver, Canada. The office occupies one floor of a building on Broadway St. The rest of the building is used to house the server farm that hosts our uploaded minds.
Things were pretty much as I remembered them. The streets bustled with garishly painted electric cabs. The sidewalks were heavily crowded with pedestrians. The style of clothing had changed somewhat. Women wore flowery skirts and tended to wear white tights on top of one or two inch heels. Men dressed the same as always as far as I could tell. I noticed that the ubiquitous HUDs glasses from the 50s had largely disappeared, replaced with something more subtle, I presumed. The street level was mostly restaurants and clothing stores. Above were offices and residential towers, where humans lived in their little 300 sq. foot apartments.
-------- 6 --------
I felt very out of place. These people looked busy. They hurried along with clipped strides, many engaged in remote conversations. Others stood along the walls staring out into space, obviously absorbed by their personal interfaces. Where I normally spent my day playing, sleeping or relaxing, these people worked hard to feed and clothe and house themselves. They urinated and defecated. They ate not for just fun but also out of necessity. As they aged they spent enormous sums of money on gene and nano-therapies to keep their bodies from decaying. And still they died - by the hundreds of millions.
Vancouver was one of the most affluent cities on Earth, but the people along the equatorial bands had faced apocalypse. By the early 50s the average temperature in several areas had pushed past the point where grains and rice could grow. In some areas, the temperature would stay above 50 Celsius for weeks at a time. Crops failed and billions of desperate refugees began to push north or south to escape the famines. Millions without the means to leave died in the ensuing chaos and lawlessness.
Northern countries had reacted in different ways. The European Union had closed and militarized its borders, using its wealth and power to hold back the waves of humanity; but the Europeans had suffered deep emotional scars of guilt in the process. Weaker nations such as Russia and Canada had been unable to stem the tide. Roughly a billion Chinese had streamed into Siberia. They had brought their own institutions with them and either ignored the Russian government's protests or bribed the local politicians into compliance. Although Canada had nominally maintained its sovereignty, it had been forced to throw open its borders and absorb 90 million Americans and Mexicans. Every year, millions more were receiving their Canadian citizenships. Vancouver had ballooned to over 12m. Toronto had passed 30m and was still growing. Whole new cities had sprung up in the north, where what had previously been tundra was being laboriously converted over to agriculture.
-------- 7 --------
Humanoid Robots were not a common sight in Vancouver and I was noticed at once. Westerners preferred to keep their robots dumb, specialized and looking more like appliances than people. The pedestrians on the street kept a wide berth. Most averted their gaze, but one woman shot me a hostile stare. To her I was probably an abomination. She might even have been one of the religious types who believed that I was a soul-less facsimile of my former biological self.
I used my interface to signal a cab. In moments one exited traffic and glided to a stop beside me. I opened the door and got in. It was a standard cab, with two plush couches facing each other, and no driver. A voice asked me for my destination and I spoke the address of the NASC office. The cab accelerated smoothly to 120 kph. It raced through the city’s cross-streets without pause, in a breathless dance of automotive choreography. Humans could never drive like this. I could still remember stop lights from my childhood, but since manually driven cars had been outlawed in the city, they had become irrelevant and were eventually taken down. Now the cars spoke to each other, coordinating the smooth flow of traffic.
The NASC office was in southern Surrey, and the countdown clock in the cab told me the trip would take a little under 15 minutes, so I set an alarm in my personal interface, disconnected from the robot and jumped back to the Polynesian sim, where I spent the rest of the cab ride in the woods, searching for a good tree for a new mast.
-------- 8 --------
The North American Security Commission. Put a democratic society under enough stress, subject it to enough fear and this is what you get. The NASC is a union of America's Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, FBI, Canada's CSIS spy network and elements of the RCMP. The decades of the mid 21st century were defined by unrelenting war and unrest. The Canadian and American governments responded by bestowing more and more power onto their various security organizations and integrating them tightly. Although the various arms of the NASC are still technically subordinate to their respective elected leaders, no elected representative would dare cross them. Just the hint of an investigation by the NASC was enough to make a politician's support and funding evaporate. Thus they virtually have a free hand to do as they pleased.
The local NASC detachment was housed in a nondescript industrial-park building. The logos of the various agencies that composed the NASC flew from flagpoles in front of the building's main entrance. At the door stood a pair of security guards and a sensor arch for visitors to walk through. My approach caused some consternation. First they frisked me, which was a useless gesture given my total lack of clothing or pockets. Then they asked me to step through the sensor arch, but whatever data it provided didn't clear up their concerns. After some back and forth with their superiors it was decided that I would be given a security escort to and from Mr. Gaudet's office. Two armed guards came out of the building and positioned themselves in front and behind me. The one behind brandished a large mag-rail rifle.
-------- 9 --------
Mr. Gaudet turned out to be hard looking man of indecipherable age. He had clearly been on anti aging treatments for a while but it was impossible to say how long. He sat in a small office behind an old wooden desk. Like most modern offices, the desk was completely bare, the better to project Gaudet's private desktop interface onto. The walls of the room were also bare, though it was entirely possible that when Gaudet looked at them he saw pictures of his family or his dog or hardcore pornography or whatever else he pleased. Altogether there was nothing in the room to give me the slightest hint of the man's character. Mr. Gaudet was clearly a very private man.
Gaudet rose to his feet as I entered, his face turning red. "I explicitly ordered VivraTerra to send a human representative."
Had I been in a sim, my face would have turned as red as his, but as it was my robot just stiffened and made its best attempt to frown.
"Mr. Gaudet. There are none of any authority to send. I'm sure you know very well that VivraTerra is a collective of uploaded individuals. I am here as its duly appointed representative."
"Uploaded individuals?" he roared. "I'm talking to a computer simulation of a dead man driving a god damned domestic appliance! This Polis you're part of has killed more people than I can count, with your ridiculous fantasy of a digital paradise."
The interview had clearly not started well.
"Look, there's no point in arguing philosophy. I clearly believe that uploading doesn't kill you or I wouldn't be here right now. I am the appointed representative of VivraTerra's governing council and I have the authority to represent the Polis in this matter. There is no-one better suited to hear what you have to say, so you can either talk to me or I can leave."
"I'm going to track down some HUMAN representatives of your company and drag them in here."
"I'll save you the trouble. There are none. VivraTerra is a private corporation, owned by just one woman. She's an elderly lady, who for medical reasons is currently in cryogenic stasis. Her estate, including VivraTerra is administered by Western Trust Bank. All they're authorized to do is sign the annual certificate of incorporation and rubber stamp our tax forms. They have no idea how our organization is run and speaking to them would be a waste of your time. There are no humans for you to talk to Mr. Gaudet!"
"Ridiculous. In a company worth nearly half a trillion dollars there isn’t one human working for it!?"
"At any given time there are thousands of very competent people seeing to VivraTerra's affairs Mr. Guadet. I'm one of them."
Gaudet dropped back into his chair and sat silently for a while.
"You should know that I find talking to a ghost inside of a fucking toaster extremely distasteful, but for the sake of expediency I'll leave my message with this machine. We have evidence that VivraTerra has violated at least 10 articles of the US nuclear regulatory act. This is sufficient grounds for the NASC to execute a warrant and seize any and all paper documents as well as electronic storage devices for the sake of gathering further evidence and building a case against the company. Should VivraTerra be found guilty in a court of law then the company would likely be disincorporated, its assets impounded and its board members, or in your case board member would face criminal charges, punishable by up to life imprisonment."
That was a lot more than I had expected, but before I could find a response, Gaudet continued.
"However the NASC is not unaware of the fact that VivraTerra hosts over 200,000 very sophisticated bio-neural simulations, each of which has great deal of autonomy. It's possible that what has occurred may not have been sanctioned by the company itself and that one of these neural simulations may simply be... malfunctioning. So we're giving VivraTerra exactly one week to voluntarily turn over the information we want and make a proper account of its behavior. If you do this to our satisfaction, then we may decide to forgo pressing charges.
Gaudet projected a folder onto the table and gestured toward it. "The lab was partially destroyed by whoever was running it, probably in an attempt to cover their tracks. These are some of the before-pictures. We want to know exactly what VivraTerra was doing in Utah, and why, including any and all technical diagrams and details, and most importantly we want the blueprints to that nuclear fusion generator you built there. You have one week to come up with this information. Here are the details, now get out!"
I downloaded the folder and, seeing no point in further dialogue without first reviewing its contents, surrendered the field to Gaudet and headed for the door. The guards escorted me out of the building where I dumped the robot into the next available cab and jumped back to my house.
-------- 10 --------
I sat down on a deck chair on the porch and used my interface to create a new desktop. I bent it into a curved surface, named it 'NASC research' and levitated it in front of me at arm's reach. It looked like a large floating pane of semi-transparent glass. Next I pulled the files out of the Gaudet's folder and spread them out over the desktop.
There wasn't very much to review. The NASC was not the kind of shop that liked to volunteer information. The first file simply contained a street address of some building in Utah and the name and business number of the company that it was registered to. The company was named Orion Research Inc.
I launched a mapping app and zoomed in for a bird's-eye view. The address turned out to be that of an airfield off HWY 40, about 150 km south-east of Salt Lake City. There was a single paved runway, a hut sprouting several aerials and a radome, and an enormous airplane hangar. The hangar's main door was about 60 feet tall and wide enough to engulf a jetliner. Its full length was nearly 500 feet. A quick search on the address revealed that the airfield was privately owned and was indeed registered to Orion Research. A further search on Orion came up empty. The company had no homepage and had apparently never been referred to by any website.
Gaudet's folder also contained a few photos, apparently taken from inside the hangar. One picture showed a large server farm, probably 300 racks arranged in 10 long rows. The racks appeared to be full, which meant that each one probably held about one hundred blade servers. The racks were powered and cooled from above by cables and pipes descending from a metal scaffolding that ran down the length of each row. In the photo the machines all appeared to be turned off.
The next photo showed a heavy, cylindrical steel vacuum chamber about 20 feet in diameter and 20 feet high. A tangled nest of wires and pipes sprouted from its domed roof. On the side facing the camera was an open heavy door with a window in it and steel wheel that operated its locking mechanism.
The third photo was of the interior of the vacuum chamber. Suspended at its center was a spherical dodecahedron about 6 feet in diameter. It was composed of 12 circular metal rings. The rings did not quite touch each other and were each supported by four metal arms that extended straight out from the dodecahedron. The arms met up with a heavy supporting scaffolding that ran along the floor, ceiling and walls of the vacuum chamber. Encircling the dodecahedron was a sphere made up of a tight metal mesh, about 12 feet in diameter. Traveling down the support arms and into each ring were two rubber tubes, apparently there to transport some liquid or gas into the rings.
The last photo was even more perplexing. It showed an enormous square steel-mesh box, each side about 60 feet long. The inside of the box was crammed full of high voltage electrical equipment. I could see what looked like massive transformers and capacitors. There were several stacked rings that looped around the whole inside of the mesh cube. Each ring was a large metal tube, heavily adorned with complex looking electrical machinery. The rest of the equipment I couldn't begin to identify.
The folder contained only one other file, which was a short text document repeating Gaudet's demands for an explanation of the purpose of this equipment and the blueprints for their design.
-------- 11 --------
I stared at the photos for a few minutes but they meant nothing to me. Electrical engineering was hardly my forte. Well, first things first. I jumped back into the robot, got it out of the cab and marched it back up to the office and into its alcove. Then I jumped back to the house and sent a high priority message to Mr. Speer, requesting a meeting and sending him a link to my house.
He replied within seconds, but only with audio. An orange 1970's style telephone materialized and began floating in front of me. The phone started ringing. I lifted the receiver from its cradle and brought it up to my ear.
"Hello Jarrod, did you find out what Gaudet wanted?"
"Yes Sir. The NASC found some sort of research lab in Utah and Gaudet's convinced that it was operated by VivraTerra, or one of our uploads. He says that we built some sort of experimental nuclear reactor there and he's giving us a week to hand over the designs or he'll seize all of our servers. He gave me an address and a few pictures. I'm sending them to you now".
I made a copy of my open desktop, collapsed it into an icon and then shoved the icon through the mouthpiece of the phone. There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the phone.
"That's a lot of expensive equipment, but why does Gaudet think we have anything to do with it?
"I don't know. All I have is those photos and the address. I guess Gaudet either believes that VivraTerra is directly involved, or if not, we have some way of finding out who is."
"Did he actually say he'd confiscate our servers?"
"Yes, and from what I could tell I don't think he believes or cares that turning off those machines would amount to an act of genocide. Sir, I have to ask - are we involved in this research company in any way?"
"I've never heard of it and I don't see how it would be possible. VivraTerra exists only to maintain the hardware, software and legal infrastructure for our uploads. There's nothing in our mandate for funding energy research, let alone unsanctioned nuclear experiments. It's either a private upload or Gaudet is simply wrong about our involvement."
"Yes, that was my conclusion as well" I replied.
"Well I suppose the next step would be to find that upload if he exists. I'm going to call an emergency council meeting to start an investigation and organize a legal defense. Given the seriousness of the allegations against us, we'll have to take Gaudet's threat at face value. In the meantime I'd like you to find out why Gaudet believes we're connected to this research lab. Please contact me at once if you find anything or need help."
I paused for a moment. "Mr. Speer, there is one thing you could do for me. As you know my background isn't technical and I'm going to need some help analyzing all the equipment in these photos. I'd like to bring in an aid if I may. Melanie Cutler. I've known her for several years and I think she may be able to help."
"One moment, I'll get her file. Yes that should be fine. She has graduate degrees in mechanical and computer engineering. One moment… I have just recruited her. Anything else?"
"No that's all. I'll report back as soon as I have something."
"Until then." The link went dead. I put the receiver back in its cradle and the phone dematerialized, then I collapsed the desktop and pocketed it.
-------- 12 --------
Melanie materialized in the kitchen less than five minutes later and stormed out onto the deck. She was wearing her usual Polynesian outfit which consisted of a bikini bottom wrapped by a light sarong and nothing else.
"You had me recruited? What the hell?"
"Hi Melanie. Uh, sorry about that."
"Apparently I work for this Mr. Speer guy now? Who's that?"
"Minister of Foreign Relations. He handles matters dealing with the outside world."
"You know I've already got a job working on the polis's software systems. I'm actually pretty deep into some new software right now. It'll be pretty hard to pull away from that and then dive back into it later."
"I know, I'm sorry Melanie. I need someone I already know and trust for this, and it could be really important."
"Well, what is it then?"
"Sit down" I said, gesturing at the second patio chair and reaching into my pocket for my desktop. "I'll show you."
-------- 13 --------
Melanie stared at the four photos.
"And Gaudet thinks this lab is a big nuclear fusion experiment? It's a strange request isn't it, him wanting us to turn over the reactor’s blueprints? I mean if you found a lab doing illegal nuclear research, wouldn't you just arrest the people involved?"
"I've been thinking about that. Gaudet must have his reasons for giving us this week's grace period."
"I bet the reactor is this weird polygon thing inside the vacuum chamber. Those big circles that make up the surfaces of the sphere are probably superconducting magnets."
"The only explanation I can think of is that he wants the nuclear reactor much more than he wants to press charges. If he were to seize VivraTerra's servers and arrest us all, it probably wouldn't get him the reactor. For one thing nobody knows who built it; it could be any one of the 200,000 people who live here, or it might not be an upload at all. Some organization could just be using VivraTerra as a front, and shutting down VivraTerra would just sever Gaudet's only link to them."
Melanie looked up from the pictures. "And even if he did grab our servers, they wouldn't do him any good without our cooperation. We've been working on our own hard encryption for years now. I doubt even NASC could break it, and even if they could, they’d have to sift through exabytes of data.”
“True. Then there’s the political fallout to consider. A lot of humans hate uploads, but many others who don’t. 200,000 uploads would have a lot of friends and business connections in the real world.”
Melanie nodded. “If you offline a whole polis you’d have a big public backlash.”
Melanie frowned. “Guadet said he especially wanted the reactor plans? What if it was more than just an experiment? What if it actually produced useful power?”
Her eyes darted over the photos again. “Nobody’s ever managed to make an energy-positive fusion reactor before. After the failure of ITER in the 2020’s, there hasn’t been much research into fusion, people basically gave up.
If someone could build one, it would change the world. We could get rid of coal and oil and actually do something about global warming. That kind of tech would be worth almost anything.”
I nodded. “Especially now that global warming’s doing so much damage and even coal’s becoming expensive. Maybe we should assume that Gaudet believes he’s found a successful reactor prototype. If so, he’d be prepared to do almost anything and take big risks to get it.”
“That makes him pretty dangerous.” Melanie said. “I’d take his threat to shut down the whole polis at face value. He’ll do it if we can’t give him a better option.”
“Why would the blueprints be so important?” I asked. “Why does he need them if he has the reactor itself?”
Melanie expanded the photo of the inside of the vacuum chamber and looked closer. “I’m not familiar with this design. It doesn’t look anything like the tokomaks the ITER experiment was working on. There’s no torus, and if those rings are magnets then all of their fields would get focused up right in the center of that dodecahedron. However this thing works, it would probably need very precise computer control to regulate the magnetic fields and inject the fuel at exactly the right time and in exactly the right amounts. Most of the magic wouldn’t be in the hardware itself but in the software, which Guadet probably doesn’t have. He also said that the reactor was partially trashed. I’ll bet the computers were wiped clean too.”
“Makes sense, but we still need to figure out who built the thing. Do you see any components here that are rare or exotic, something we could trace?”
Melanie stared at the photos. “I’d focus on those superconducting magnets. You don’t normally see many that big outside of a particle physics lab. They’d have to be custom built and there aren’t many companies out there that do that. I’ll see if I can get you a short list.”
“Great.” I took another look at the photos. “Do you have any idea what all that equipment inside that big metal cage in the second photo is for?”
“Well the cage is probably a Faraday cage. It creates an electromagnetic shield around whatever’s inside so no radio signals can get in or out. I have no idea what the rest of the equipment is for. Those huge rings with magnets all the way around them, they look a bit like particle accelerators; like much smaller versions of the ones at CERN on the border between Switzerland and France. They could be used to accelerate particles to very high energies.”
“Does that have anything to do with nuclear fusion?” I asked.
“Not directly. I mean you can use particle accelerators to fuse hydrogen or helium nuclei together, but you’d use up so much power doing it that you’d never get anywhere close to break-even power. Besides these rings don’t look like they’re connected to the reactor itself.”
-------- 14 --------
I heard footsteps from the kitchen.
“Hi guys” said Emma as she came out onto the deck. Her blond hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail and she was wearing a dark green summer dress. “I don’t normally see you two here. Are you working on work-work?”
“Hi Emma” Melanie replied, assuming a sarcastic grin “Your father couldn’t keep his little nightmare to himself. He got his boss to recruit me. It seems I work for your dad now.”
“Not very smart Dad.”
I smirked. “Couldn’t be helped. If Melanie wants to take revenge for this, then I guess I’ll just have to survive whatever she dishes out. Time for homework?”
“Uh huh.”
Melanie turned to me. “I’ll track down the superconductor supplier. Why don’t you stay here with Emma in the meantime. There isn’t really much else we can do right now anyway.”
“Ok, thanks. Come on Emma, let’s get set up.”
Melanie stood up, waved goodbye and vanished from sight.
Emma sat down at the kitchen table in front of her still-open desktop and I pulled up a chair beside her. “So what did you cover in class today?”
“Planets. Julia was telling us about planets and solar systems.”
“And what’s for homework today?”
“Well we know of about 1000 roughly earth-sized planets outside the solar system. I’m supposed to find which of them are most likely to have life like ours and write up a report on why.”
“Do you have the list?”
We got down to business. It was a good homework assignment, covering biology, chemistry and astronomy. We stared by researching all the known requirements for life and then started whittling down the list. After a few hours of hard work we had narrowed it down to 10.
“This sucks.” Emma said. I don’t think we can do any better than the top ten.
“I can’t think of anything else we could take into consideration.” I said, “These planets are all the right mass, around the right kind of star, the right distance from the star in nice solar systems where all the planets have stable, circular orbits. They’re not too close to any pulsars, recent supernovas or other sources of radiation. They’re not tidally locked to their suns, which means they have a day and a night, so it never gets too hot or too cold. That’s just about everything we can tell about them right now.”
Emma shook her head. “For all we know half of them could have atmospheres of sulfur and carbon dioxide. They could be hell-worlds like Venus and we’d never know.”
“Well, I think we did pretty well. Your teacher should be pleased.”
“I guess. I’ll write this up in a report after dinner. I’m getting hungry.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“I know we had it yesterday, but I’d like BBQ’d fish with pineapple again.”
“Ok. Here or from the lagoon?” by which I was asking whether she wanted to conjure dinner out of thin air and eat it here, or if she wanted to play by Polynesia’s rules, where everything had to be gathered or made by hand.
“From the lagoon!”
“Ok. Let’s go.”
-------- 15 --------
I made a quick wardrobe change back to my Polynesian clothes and followed Emma to our usual jump point on the beach. It was late afternoon, cloudless with a light breeze. I jogged back to the village to fetch our spear guns and Emma readied her tri. My boat still lay in ruins further down the beach.
“Ready Captain?” I asked as I returned with a spear gun in each hand.
“Uh huh” Emma replied absentmindedly. Her eyes were focused on her invisible interface. “I’m just checking the dolphin cams... they’re hunting! We can join them. Quick get in!”
We pushed the boat off the beach and forced it past the breakers. I lifted Emma in and she took the steering position at the tiller. Then I turned the boat around so it faced away from the beach and climbed in, taking my place ahead of Emma to handle the sails. “I’m going to dial up more wind or we’ll never get there in time.” Emma yelled.
A second later the breeze picked up and rose relentlessly to nearly 20 knots. I stuck my feet under the safety straps and leaned out as far as I could, using my bodyweight to counterbalance the force of the wind on the sails to prevent it from flipping us over. Both the windward hull and the center hull rose out of the water and we flew on a single hull, the centerboard humming loudly as it sliced deep into the water at high speed. As the boat leaped over each wave Emma and I were drenched repeatedly with bucket-loads of warm salt water. I risked taking my eyes off the sails for a split second to catch a look of wild glee on Emma’s face.
In just a few minutes we were nearly a kilometer offshore and approaching the large outer reef that ringed our island within the lagoon. Up ahead was a small patch where the sea appeared to be foaming. As we got closer I could make out hundreds of fish all trying to leap out of the water at the same time.
When we were within 50 feet of the dolphin hunt, Emma turned the boat up into the wind and yelled for me to drop the sail. I freed the correct line and the mainsail collapsed onto the center hull. Emma sprang past me on the netting between the hulls, took the anchor from the anchor box at the foot of the mast and threw it overboard. Then she grabbed her spear gun and dove headfirst from the front of the boat. Just before she disappeared under the water I saw her legs melt together. Her feet merged, then flattened and expanded, turning into a large tail-flipper.
A second later I dove deep into the water myself. A number of exceptions to the conventional laws of mundane physics come into play when you find yourself under water in the Polynesian sim. For one thing, the sim allows you to exchange your legs for a dolphin style flipper with powerful muscles. This lets you swim faster and more gracefully; the need to breathe switches off, you can dive to any depth without risking nitrogen bubbles in your blood and your eyes remain in perfect focus without the need for goggles.
Once under water, I could see the dolphin hunt in progress. They were mounting a coordinated wrangling operation against their hapless school of fish. Up to ten dolphins at a time were diving twenty feet below the school to circle it. As they circled, they released a steady stream of air bubbles from their blowholes. The bubbles percolated up through the sparkling water to form a ring of air that the fish wouldn’t swim through. As we watched, the dolphins drew their noose tighter and tighter around the school. When one dolphin exhausted its air supply another would swim down to take its place. The rest of the school darted up the center of the ring from below, grabbing their prey and pinning the fish against the surface.
We swam closer and two of the dolphins broke off hunting to greet us. Emma stroked the back of the nearest one when it drew close. She knew each one by its appearance and the way it moved.
Emma swam through the ring of bubbles and drew back the bolt on her spring-loaded spear gun. She waited for a break in the stream of feeding dolphins and fired. On her third attempt she hooked a foot-long fish. She reeled it in and attached it to a line trailing from her waist, then prepared for another shot.
It was at moments like these that I felt the greatest sense of peace. The water was cool against my skin and the rays from the sun turned the surface into a dazzling ceiling of ever-shattering diamonds. Emma’s long hair flowed out behind her as she drifted inside the curtain of bubbles. I swam to join her in the hunt.
-------- 16 --------
The decision to upload with Emma was the hardest one I have ever had to make.
I had begun to seriously consider it four years earlier on the day I buried Nicola, my wife and Emma's mother. Emma, had been withdrawn and quiet during the ceremony. When Nicola’s mother stood up to speak to the congregation, she said that while her daughter's death was tragic, it was God's Will, and that accepting death and learning to continue without her, was part of being human. Grief welled up in me and for a moment my reserve broke down. My heart leapt into my throat and I surrendered to involuntary sobs. Little eight year old Emma took my hand and tried to comfort me. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her tightly.
That night back at home it was Emma’s turn. Nicola had been in the habit of putting Emma to sleep every night and so her absence was most poignant before bed. I cradled her in my arms, stroked her hair and comforted her as she sobbed. After a long time her cries softened to weeping and she fell into a restless sleep, only to wake again with fresh tears. During that long night I swore to myself that our lives would never again be torn apart by death.
I sold our townhouse in Ottawa, liquidated my pension fund and took a two week vacation from work; then with Emma in hand I boarded a plane to Holland.
Uploading was illegal in Canada and the US because it was treated as assisted suicide, but VivraTerra ran an upload clinic in Amsterdam. Ironically, while Holland’s largely secular population was just about tolerant of uploading, its corporate privacy laws were too weak to risk setting up a polis there. That’s why most polises ran upload clinics in Holland and a handful of other progressive nations, but placed their hardware in corporate-friendly North America or Asia.
We landed at Schiphol and took the train into Amsterdam’s central station. From there it was a few minute’s walk to our hotel. With one hand for Emma and another for our rolling luggage, we slowly strolled down the pedestrian-only street. It was early morning and the sky was pink. I felt a light breeze on my cheeks, tainted by a slight odor from the canals. We found a small café and decided to stop in. I ordered some toast and juice for Emma, and a tostie and a 'biertje' for myself. The tostie turned out to be a grilled cheese sandwich with ham but it was the beer that I remember most; fresh, light and sweet, like nothing in Canada. Emma was delighted to discover that the Dutch served toast with chocolate sprinkles on top. I slowly drank my beer and it struck me that that this would be one of the last times I would sip real bear with human lips.
For our last week as humans I had ordered a suite with a large bedroom and a separate sitting room. We checked in, closed the curtains against the day and went to sleep. Emma and I spent the next few days exploring Amsterdam and the surrounding countryside.
-------- 17 --------
On the morning of our appointment with VivraTerra I woke early at 6AM, 4 hours ahead of our appointment. Emma was still asleep. I quietly picked up my huds from the nightstand, fished out my video camera from our luggage and headed into the sitting room. I closed the bedroom door behind me. There was a bowl of fruit on the coffee table and I plucked a few grapes. After a slight delay, my huds managed to log me into my bank account and 60 seconds later I had finished transferring every last penny into VivraTerra’s holding account. Half the total amount would soon be redacted for the cost of uploading.
Only then did I feel safe to call my Mother. I picked up the video cam and tossed it up in the air in front of me. Its translucent wasp wings unfolded instantly and it settled into a hover, focusing its lens on me. The image of my Mother’s head with her fridge and stove in the background appeared on my huds a moment later.
“Hi Mom” I began. “Hello Jarrod” she replied, obviously distracted by a kitchen chore. “How’s your vacation going?”
“It’s been fine. I took Emma on a boat ride and she really loved seeing the cows beside the canal. We also went to see the new dams – they’re incredible!”
“They’d better be if the Dutch want to stay above that rising waterline. How’s the food over there?”
“Emma’s in love with Dutch waffles and chocolate sprinkles and I’m in love with the beer. How have you been doing?”
“Oh fine. I’ve been busy with my church groups and walking club. Let’s see, if I remember your itinerary you’ll be taking the train to Paris tomorrow right? I’m sure Emma will love that.”
I froze up, overcome by anguish over what I was about to do to my poor mother, who had been nothing but wonderful to me my whole life.
“What’s wrong Jarrod?”
“Mom I’ve got something I need to tell you. It’s important. I want you to sit down though. Do you think you could have a seat in the living room?”
A look of concern crossed my Mother’s face. “Is Emma ok Jarrod?”
“She’s fine but this does have something to do with that.”
“Ok, one minute.” Her palm grew to blacken the whole screen as she plucked her videocam out of the air. I could hear her making her way out of the kitchen. A minute later the video feed came back. I saw my Mother sitting on her couch.
“Ok Jarrod” She said. “Go ahead.”
"Mom, you know that Nicola meant everything to me. She's gone now and there's nothing I can do to fix the hole she left in our lives. I've been thinking very hard about what her absence will mean for my and Emma's future. There are a lot of things that are broken now that I can't fix. For one, I can't afford to keep the townhouse and send Emma to school on just my salary. Emma and I would have to move into one of those tiny apartments that's all just a single room. We'll be very cramped. A girl entering her teen years deserves some space."
My mom frowned but I pressed on. "Nicola's work schedule was flexible and she was able to be home every day in time to take care of Emma after school. My job's very demanding and I often have to work overtime. Who will take care of Emma when I'm at work?"
"You'll find ways to cope." My mother said, "Those apartments aren't so bad if you lay out your living space with care, and there are after-school programs available for Emma."
"It's more than just that Mom, I'm sure you've noticed the world isn't heading in a very positive direction. Nicola was killed by cancer. She was just 36 years old. The doctors said it was most likely caused by a buildup of toxicity in her system. When I ask Emma what color the sky is, she says sometimes blue but mostly grey or brown. Every summer Ottawa's hit with soot from the burning arboreal forests. The world keeps building more coal plants and the mercury and sulfur levels keep rising. A few years back we all got dosed with fallout from the nuclear war in the far east, and I can only imagine the chemicals and pollutants we eat every day in our food. How can I be sure that I'll be around to take care of Emma as she grows up, and what kind of world will she have to live in when she does?"
"I don't know what to tell you dear, the world has always been a difficult place to live in. I know you have challenges but I also know you're strong. You'll always find a way."
"Wouldn't you have said the same thing of Nicola? That she would always be able to meet her challenges?"
That silenced her for a while.
"Jarrod, you have to be strong. You have to find a way to keep going, for Emma's sake."
"Mom, Emma's classroom has 70 kids in it. I spend nearly a third my income on food. When Nicola got sick they gave her 2 days in the hospital and a box of pills to take home. They probably could have saved her but there was no money. Through my job I've heard this from some of the top people in the country. Every year costs keep going up and there's less money to go around. Every year it gets worse and it's going to keep getting worse. The only thing that could turn things around would be some new breakthrough technology, but research spending has been cut to virtually nothing. Our whole world's in a slow downward spiral."
"We just have to keep our faith in God. He has a plan for us all. He'll never abandon us Jarrod."
"Mom, you know I've never believed in that. All I know is the world I see with my own eyes and I need to do what's best for Emma and me. I'm going to take her to a place where she'll never be touched by death ever again, and where I'll have the time and resources to raise her properly; a place where she won't be crowded, won't be threatened by a new plague every few years and where she won't have to eat food laced with mercury, radioactivity, nano-tech fertilizers, ultra-pesticides and God knows what else."
"Jarrod, what are you talking about?" My mom's look of sympathetic concern had suddenly changed to one of alarm.
"I'm sorry Mom, I know you don't believe in this, but I've decided that the best thing for Emma and me is to upload to one of the virtual worlds. I've applied for immigration to VivraTerra and we've been accepted."
My mother sat in stone silence. I watched her expression of alarm quickly morph into one of shock and anger. Finally she said, "Jarrod, you can't be serious. It's an abomination and you know it. It's no different from suicide. I've seen documentaries. The doctors put you to sleep. They inject a lethal drug that kills you. Then they flash-freeze your body and scan your brain by slicing it apart, piece by piece. You can't be serious about this."
"Mom, if you've seen the documentaries then they must have gone over the philosophical debates about identity as well. I believe that the software copy the scanner creates will be me. It will be a continuation of my conscious mind. It will have all my memories, feelings and faculties. It'll be a perfect copy of my brain and nervous system. Every neuron and synapse will be reproduced perfectly, along with everything else that makes up my mind. Yes there's an interruption in consciousness, but that's no different from going to sleep at night or being put under anesthetic for surgery. Otherwise, who's to say the thing that wakes up in the morning is still you? The idea of a continuous stream of consciousness is already an illusion"
"Well of course it’s still you, it's still your own flesh and blood, your own mind, your own soul. Jarrod what you're talking about is suicide!"
"Mom, say I were to crush my legs and the doctors replaced them with robot limbs. Would I still be me? What if my chest were crushed too and they had to put my head on a life support system. Now my whole body is gone and there's just my head hooked up to a heart and lung machine, am I still me?"
"That's a disgusting thought Jarrod."
"Am I still me!?"
"Yes of course you'd still be you."
"Well, what if instead of being crushed I had a stroke and lost my motor skills. What if the doctors cut out the dead parts of my brain and replaced it with a neural chip, and I then learned to walk again. Part of my brain would now be running in a computer, would I still be me?"
"Jarrod that's not the point."
"Yes it is! Say the doctor's then discovered that another part of my brain was damaged, and without it I would lose the ability to access or form long term memories, what if they were able to replace that with another..."
My mother wasn't listening anymore. I could see her fury building. "Don't try to rationalize this Jarrod. If you do this you'll die, plain and simple; you'll be murdering your own daughter and you’ll be committing a mortal sin against God. How can you even think of something so terrible, much less be serious about it? I know the loss of Nicola has been terrible for you but you have to get a grip on reality. Jarrod your daughter needs you!"
"Mom, I've been thinking about this for a long time, long before Nicola died. Life in a virtual world is better than out here in just about every way. There's no scarcity, no disease, no death. All the problems of real life disappear in an instant and you wake up in an ideal world in perfect health. All you need is a computer and some power and you can live forever in perfect comfort and safety."
"It's not real Jarrod. I thought you’d be mature enough to understand that. It's an illusion. Just a simulated world for a simulated version of you. You can't do it. It's ridiculous."
"Yes it is real. It's only you who can't understand it, and I know you never will, but I have to do what's best for me and Emma. This is the right decision and I'm going through with it. Today. I'll call you as soon as I can after the procedure. You'll see that Emma and I will be just fine."
My mother rose to her feet shouting. "Jarrod you can't do this! You can't kill yourself and my Emma. You'll leave me with nothing. I'll stop you if I have to. I'll call the police!"
"The police won't touch us here Mom, this is why I came to Amsterdam in the first place. It was never a vacation. Uploading is enough of a gray area here that the police and the courts don't get involved. They always look the other way. I'll call you in a few days. I love you mom. I'm sorry. Goodbye."
"Jarrod!!!" I cut the connection and switched my status to unavailable, preventing her or anyone else from calling me.
-------- 18 --------
I buried my head in my hands and sat still for several minutes. Eventually I stood up and went to the bedroom to wake Emma. I stood by the bed looking at my sleeping daughter. She looked so lovely and pure. In a few hours this body would be dead. Her head first riddled with nano-machines, then frozen, cut apart and scanned. Could I really go through with this? Was I really thinking clearly? Had my judgment been affected by the loss of Nicola?
Gently I stroked Emma's hair. "Wake up Emma. It’s morning."
She opened her eyes and smiled up at me. "Hi Daddy."
"Come on Honey" I said, "Let’s get you some breakfast. We have a big day ahead of us. Today we're going to a brand new place."
A few hours later we were ready to leave. With our bag packed we left the hotel and walked the few hundred meters to the clinic. We entered the waiting room and I told Emma to sit down in one of the chairs while I went up to the counter to check in. Our paperwork had long since been filled out.
After a few minutes a man dressed in a tie and white lab coat walked into the room.
"Mr. Roamer I presume? I'm Dr. Van Zeller."
I stood up and shook his hand. "It's nice to meet you."
The doctor smiled and looked down at Emma sitting in her chair. "You must be Emma. How are you?"
"Fine..." Emma answered shyly.
Dr. Van Zeller turned back to me. “I understand that you have been fully briefed, and that you have signed all the waivers and been evaluated by a staff psychologist as being of sound mind and judgment for making this decision. Nevertheless, I want you to look me in the eye and tell me with absolute certainty that this is what you want for you and your daughter. Once the procedure has been performed, you can never go back. Are you sure this is what you want?"
"I'm sure", I replied.
"Ok then. We'll start with Emma. We want you to be with her when we apply the anesthetic, and we'll keep her uploaded self frozen until you're fully awake again. That way you'll also be there when she wakes up."
"Let’s get started then." I said.
"This way please." The doctor opened the door and led us through a hallway to another room. Most of the room was taken up by a very large machine with a rounded opening in the center into which a bed could be slid on rails. I picked up Emma and sat her on the bed.
"Could I have a minute please Doctor"?
"Of course. I'll be in my office at the end of the hall, please knock on the door when you're ready."
I helped Emma out of her clothes and into the hospital gown I found on the bed. Then I lay her down and covered her with a blanket.
I took Emma's hand in mine. "Emma, today we're about to go to a new place. It’s a very different and special place, but much better than here. We're going to live there from now on. You and me; but the only way to get there is to go to sleep. The doctor is going to help us with that. Next thing you know we'll wake up together in the new place. Do you understand?"
"Are we going to live there forever Daddy?"
"Yes Sweetheart. It'll be a much better home for us the Ottawa was, you'll see. I won't need to work there very much and we'll be able to spend all our time together."
"Will my friends be there too?"
"They'll still be living in Ottawa, but you can still talk to them on telepresence. And they can come visit you whenever they want."
"Will they have to go to sleep to come visit me?"
"No honey, you only need to go to sleep if you want to live there, other people can come and visit without going to sleep."
"I don't get it Daddy. Why do we have to live there, and how will my friends get there? Where is this new place anyway?"
"Don't worry about it honey. You'll understand soon. You know we can't stay in our old house now that Mommy's gone away. And if I have to work every day, who would take care of you?"
Emma began to weep. "I don't want to go Daddy. I want to go home to Mommy."
"I know baby" I croaked "but Mommy's gone to a place where we can't follow. You know that. Now that she's gone, we have to do the best we can. We need to look after each other now. I promise this place will be a new start for us. It will help you forget and make you feel better."
I hugged Emma as she cried softly. After a few minutes she calmed down. I fetched the doctor.
When the time came I held her hand and told her to be brave while he inserted the saline drip, and then injected the anesthetic. Dr. Van Zeller said "Now Emma, I want you to count to ten for me. Can you do that?"
Emma began counting. She drifted off at six and lay still, breathing softly.
The doctor pulled off Emma’s blanket, then walked up to the touch-screen display on the big machine and pushed the first of two buttons. Emma's bed slowly began to slide into the opening at its center. When the bed was in place a hatch closed over the opening, obscuring her from view. The second button began to flash yellow. Dr Van. Zeller turned to me to await my final confirmation. If I but nodded now, that machine would take apart my beautiful little daughter. I felt a nearly overpowering urge run up to the opening, tear off the hatch and rescue her. She had no idea what was happening. Did I really have the right to make this decision for her? Back in Canada this would be called murder. The only thing to save me is that I would be legally dead as well. A murder-suicide. That's how a good fraction of the world would see this, including my own mother.
I nodded. Dr. Van. Zeller pushed the yellow flashing button, and the bigger red flashing button that replaced it, and the even bigger red flashing button that replaced that. The machine began to hum. I stared at it and felt like my heart was being crushed inside my chest.
"Your room is next door Mr. Roamer. Please come with me."
When I was lying on my own bed and the doctor had inserted my saline drip he paused and said one last thing: "Remember the first few moments after you wake up will be very disorienting. Take it slow and don't wake Emma until you're ready and able to help her. Good luck." With that he pushed the plunger. I looked up to take in the last thing I would ever see with my biological eyes, the tiles of the clinic ceiling.
-------- 19 --------
I slowly began to wake up. I was holding Nicola's hand. She was lying in her bed. Her closed eyes were sunken deep into her skull. Her face was gray as ash, with pitted spots of black discoloration. Her once beautiful hair was mostly gone and I held her hand as she gurgled and gasped for air. I held her hand and time passed. Suddenly her free hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, crushing it with terrible strength. For a horrifying moment she opened her eyes and skewered my soul.
"Jarrod! What have you done to our daughter? What have you done!?" I struggled to free myself from her grip, but it was like steel. In horror I watched my own forearm begin to shrivel and darken, taking on the same discolorations as her own. Then she released me and collapsed back onto her bed. Her eyes rolled back into her head. She began coughing up blood and her rigid body jerked and shook in terrible seizures. Then with a groaning gasp, she exhaled her last breath and lay still.
I woke up screaming and sat straight up, grabbing the edges of my bed.
"Easy, you're all right." a voice next to me said. I turned to my left to see a woman dressed in another lab coat. "Lay back and try to relax for a moment. The procedure went well; both you and Emma are fine. Lay back now."
I sank back into bed. I felt cold sweat on my brow.
"Thank you... Sorry."
"My name's Dr. Song. I want you to lie down and relax here for a minute. Emma's sleeping soundly in the room next to you and she'll remain asleep until you're ready to wake her. There's a glass of water on the table beside you. I'll be back in a few minutes to check on you."
I lay there and gradually my heartbeat began to slow. I found myself staring at the ceiling tiles again. They looked exactly the same as before. In fact the whole room was identical to the one I went to sleep in. The tiles were white, each about a foot across, made of plastic, slightly yellowed with age. I looked closer, the plastic had minute bubbles frozen inside. The bubbles that broke through the surface looked like tiny craters on the surface of the moon. Inside each crater was an arc of shadow thrown by the nearby ceiling light. Suddenly my breath caught in my throat. Those bubbles were impossibly small; on the order of a tenth of a millimeter across. Yet I was seeing them in perfect detail even though the ceiling was at least ten feet above my head.
Then I remembered. Perfect visual acuity. This was one of the many ways in which the simulated world ignored the laws of physics for the sake of convenience. I continued to stare in wonder for a few moments longer. As I lay there I slowly began to be aware of other signals my body was sending me. My lungs felt better. With each breath the air felt sweet and invigorating; as it were super-oxygenated. The persistent feeling of constriction from the moderate tire I carried around my waste was gone. My whole body felt like a bowstring pulled taught, primed for explosive performance. I felt young. I felt fantastic.
I sat up again and swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled the cover off to have a look at myself. My muscles were tighter, the fat was all gone, but other than that I still appeared to be me. Something felt different though. I had been so used to the 'feeling' of my own body that I had been unconscious of it my whole life. Now the feeling had subtly changed, and I became aware of it. It wasn't anything I could put my finger on. It didn't hurt, but I felt oddly different.
Dr. Song came back into the room. "How do you feel?"
"Strange, not bad, just different somehow. It’s weird."
"That's normal. Your nervous system is being fed signals from a simulated body. It's impossible to perfectly reproduce the feelings of your old body, though the virtual body has been tested and fine tuned for many years now. In a few hours you'll grow used to the new feelings and soon you won't be aware of it at all. Try to stand up."
I shifted off the bed and put my weight onto my feet. After a few hesitant steps I was relieved to learn that there was nothing wrong with my sense of balance.
"Good, we've reproduced the proportions of your old body perfectly, and for the time being the speed of your reflexes are dialed down to biological levels, so you should still have the same sense of balance as before."
I nodded in agreement and smiled. "This isn't so bad. I actually feel really good. Full of energy."
"That's how an athlete feels in the real world. You're in perfect health now, with a perfect level of physical fitness. In fact better than perfect. You could run for days here without stopping." Dr. Song smiled benevolently. She was actually quite good looking; tall, slender with long black hair, porcelain skin and fine Asian features. I felt my libido begin to stir for the first time in weeks. With a start I realized I was blushing, which made me blush further.
I shook my head to clear it. "Um, I'd like to see Emma now, if that's alright."
"Are you sure you don't want to take some more time to orient yourself? She'll remain asleep until you're ready."
"No, I need to make sure she's alright."
"Ok, this way please." Dr. Song led me out of the room and back to the one I had left Emma in. With tremendous relief I saw her lying there on the bed extending out from the uploading machine, just as I had left her. Her face looked exactly the same, and as Dr. Song had promised, she appeared to be asleep, breathing softly. Dr. Song quietly left the room and closed the door. I sat down on the chair next to the bed and gently shook her shoulder.
"Emma, wake up Emma." She began to stir. Her eyes opened. She saw me and smiled.
"Hi Daddy. Is it morning?"
"Yes Honey, we're here. We made it to that special place Emma, our new home."
Emma giggled sleepily, “But Daddy we're still in the same place as before.”
She closed her eyes again and nuzzled her face into the pillow with a sigh.
Then suddenly her eyes shot wide open and she sat bolt upright. Her frame stiffened and she gasped.
"Daddy I feel weird!" she said. I put my hands on her shoulders.
"It's ok Honey."
"Daddy I feel weird!" She looked down at her own hands, turning them palm up then palm down, then palm up again. "I... I don't feel right." she said, panic rising in her voice as she struggled to process this new sensation. "Daddy, I don't feel like me. I, I think I'm inside someone else! Daddy!!"
I hugged her tightly, fighting back my own panic as she sobbed.
"It’s ok honey, It's ok. It's normal. This place just makes you feel a bit weird at first. It'll go away soon. It's ok. It's ok Emma. I'm here."
I held her like that for a long while, stroking her hair and soothing her until she began to calm down. Finally I let her go and looked her in the eyes.
"Do you feel better now?"
"A little" she sniffed. "But it still feels like I'm inside someone else."
There was a mirror on one of the walls. I stood her up and walked her over to it.
"Look Emma, you see? You're still inside you. This place just makes you feel a little funny at first. You'll be back to normal again soon. Don't worry."
"It is me.”
“See? It’s just a feeling this place gives you.”
But Daddy, this is the same place as before."
"It only looks the same, but we're actually far from there now. They make these rooms look the same to make us feel better, I think. Funny isn't it? I think you'll find that a lot of things about this place will be a little strange, but also fun. Come on, let's get you dressed and go find the doctor and then we'll go outside and have a look around."
With that I got us both dressed and then headed back to the waiting room. Dr. Song was there waiting for us.
"Hi Emma, I'm Dr. Song. How do you feel?"
"Hello" Emma smiled at her. "I feel better now. I just felt really weird when I woke up."
"Don't worry, you'll be back to normal in no time. You did very well, you should be proud. Would you like some goodies before you go? I keep a drawer full of candy for good little girls. Let’s go see what we have in it."
Emma's face lit up and she eagerly followed Dr. Song back behind the counter to rifle through the drawer.
"Thank you" I said to Dr. Song. "So what's next?"
"Take the elevator back down to the lobby. You'll find your transition support family waiting for you there. Bob and Alice Keating, and their three children. Two boys and a girl, 6, 8 and 13. They’re waiting to take you back to their home where you'll live with them until you're ready to move into a place of your own."
I led Emma to the elevator and pushed the down button, then turned to nod at the doctor a second time.
"Thanks again doctor."
"Good luck Mr. Roamer, and welcome to VivraTerra."
-------- 20 --------
When Melanie found us, I was frying up the fish we had caught with some sliced pineapples. They were sizzling and popping in a large metal skillet over the hot coals at the center of our village. The sun was getting low in the sky and other villagers were preparing their dinners as well. People greeted one another, mingled and shared food and stories. I portioned out the fish onto banana leaves and handed them out to anyone who wanted some, then I wandered around to look at what others had prepared and accepted a portion or two. When I began to tuck into my meal, Melanie gave me a nod and drifted back from the fire-pit. I followed.
We sat down together on wicker chairs in front of her hut. Between bites of fish and roasted pineapple, Melanie filled me in on her work.
“I found out where those superconductors came from. There’s only one company that makes them that big. They sell them almost exclusively to physics labs, particle accelerators and the like. The company’s called Oshiro Superconductor, out of Japan.”
“Any idea who they were dealing with on our end?” I asked.
“No. I managed to get hold of one of their VPs, but they’re pretty good about customer privacy. I couldn’t get anything out of them.”
“So it’s a dead-end then.”
Melanie shook her head “Once I knew the supplier, I thought I might be able to trace the source of any network traffic between VivraTerra and Oshiro. I told Mr. Speer what I needed and he managed to arrange access to the communications logs for me.”
“Did you find anything?”
“It’s actually more about what I didn’t find. Except for the call I made today there’s been absolutely no comm traffic between VivraTerra and Oshiro for as far back as the logs go, which is about 7 years.”
“Which would tend to support the premise that Gaudet doesn’t know what he’s talking about” I said.
“Well, it’s also possible that the comm traffic travelled through some other channels; anonymizing proxy servers for example. There’s a significant amount of traffic from VivraTerra that gets routed that way. Lots of polizens don’t want the people on the other end of the line to know that they’re communicating with an upload.”
“Hmm. Any other leads?”
“One thing. I wanted to be really sure there had been no traffic between us and Oshiro, so I did some double checking to make sure the logs haven’t been tampered with. You probably know that our servers are hooked up to three separate Internet service providers, the idea being that if one provider goes down we have redundancy.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that.”
“Well, given that there are 200,000 uploads and only three outgoing connections, you can imagine that each of the pipes carries a lot of traffic. Each pipe is a big fat fiber-optic cable. For outbound traffic, the cables are fed with data from several queues. If you want to send some data to the outside world, it’ll go into a queue, and once the data ahead of you has been sent, yours gets transmitted via one of our service providers.”
“How does this help us trace messages to Oshiro?”
“Well it doesn’t, but here’s the thing. Because there's so much of it, we only keep a week's worth of detailed traffic logging. That`s data we use to track and optimize our network infrastructure, and we also use it for security purposes. But we also log the total amount of data passing through each of our queues on a minute-by minute basis, and those logs we keep. Now, when the internet service providers bill us, they send us their own bandwidth usage numbers. If you sum up the amount of data passing through our queues, it should exactly match the amount of data they report. But according to our logs, there were about 1800 instances between 6 months and 12 months ago where we report a little less data than they do. I checked with the service providers and our own network people, and no-one can account for the discrepancy.”
“Are you taking that as evidence that our logs were tampered with?”
“It looks that way to me. The only explanation I can come up with is that someone erased data from the detailed logs and also altered the permanent bandwidth usage logs to make them correlate, but they either couldn't access the logs of our external service providers, didn`t think of it, or didn`t bother.
“But VivraTerra puts a huge amount of effort into security. Wouldn`t it be really hard to erase our logs?”
“As far as I can tell, it’s pretty much impossible. It took a council resolution just to get me full read-access to the logs. VivraTerra’s computer infrastructure was built from the ground up with security as one of the top priorities. These computers host people. They host us. The only reason a Polis like this works at all is that its citizens have trust that the servers are secure. If the servers were hackable then we ourselves could be hacked.”
I sat back and looked at the fire in the center of our circle of huts. Emma was eating with a group of her friends. Smaller children were kicking a ball around the clearing. The adults were sitting in small groups, talking and laughing softly.
“I remember the literature they made me read before signing up with VivraTerra." I said. "They had over a page on security, how important it was and how it could never be compromised. If people can hack our comm logs, what else can they do? How can any of us feel safe?”
“Well they weren’t lying about the importance we place on security. Every single piece of software executed on our core servers is read over line by line by at least three separate teams of people. Then when we run it, it’s executed inside layer upon layer of security sandboxes. You and your supporting software live in sandboxes too. The types of communications allowed in and out of a sandbox is defined very specifically and multiple layers of security enforce it. Non-critical software programs don’t even get to run on our core machines, they’re run on banks of virtualized servers, on machines on a completely separate network. To get around that kind of security? I know these systems pretty well, but I’m pretty sure I could never do it.”
I nodded. “If this gets out, everyone will panic”.
“Ya. I sent my result to the networking and IT heads and it’s got them very worried. They’re going to do everything they can to figure out how this happened and who did it. In the meantime, nobody’s being told who doesn’t need to know.”
“Is there any way to find out who did it?”
Melanie shook her head. “The detailed logs are long gone. All we have is the discrepancy in the amount of data transmitted.”
I looked back at Emma. She was cracking lobsters with some of her friends. “So here we have two extraordinary events occurring at the same time. Someone, presumably one of our uploads, manages to secretly build a working nuclear fusion reactor; something the world has been trying and failing to do for over 100 years. Around the same time, someone hacks our comm traffic logs and erases thousands of entries. I think it’s very unlikely that these events are unrelated.”
Melanie nodded. “Whoever’s responsible for the reactor may have free run of our computers. That makes them very dangerous.”
We sat together in silence for a what felt like a long time. The dusk was gradually settling and the stars were beginning to come out. Emma had run off with her friends.
“What do you think we should do next?” I asked.
“Well obviously we need to figure out who these people are, but I’m out of leads. I asked the network guys to tell me if they find anything, but they’ve taken over that investigation so who knows if we’ll get anything back from them. If you want me to do any better you’ll have to give me something new.”
“Like what?”
“Well other than the hacked logs, the only other thing we have on them is the wrecked nuke at that lab. Maybe we’d be able to work out something else if we knew more about what happened there. The NASC must have taken the place apart by now, but Gaudet just gave you an address and a couple of photos. I think you should try to get more information out of him.
“How would I do that? He works for the NASC for god’s sake.”
Melanie shrugged. “You’re the diplomat."
"Great"
"Look, you know he really wants that nuke - that’s leverage."
-------- 21 --------
The next morning I found myself back in Gaudet’s office. I had messaged Gaudet earlier and asked to speak with him, and he had replied with a curt one-liner ordering me back to his office. It was irritating that he insisted on making me come to him in person when a simple telepresence call would have been perfectly adequate.
Gaudet was tapping the surface of his wooden desk and shuffling around virtual files that only he could see. He didn’t look up as I entered.
“Do you have it?” He asked.
“If you mean the blueprints for the reactor, no. We have been making some progress though. I can tell you now with some certainty that VivraTerra’s administration had nothing to do with the events at the lab. Now we’re trying to determine whether any of our citizens were involved.”
Gaudet glared up at me. “So you deny involvement.”
“VivraTerra itself had nothing to do with this. Accounting for every one of our 200,000 private citizens is a different matter and will take some time.”
“So what do you want?”
I took a deep breath. “Right now we have no evidence linking the activities in Utah with any of our citizens. You’ve given us very little to go on, just a few photos and an address. If you want us to make your deadline then we’re going to need a lot more information to help us narrow our search. For one thing, what information do you have linking the lab to VivraTerra in the first place?”
Gaudet’s scowl deepened. “You already have everything you need. Just search your files until you find references to that address or to the reactor or anything else suspicious.”
My robot shook its head. “All of the public and government documents on our system have already been searched. As for our uploads’ private documents, we can’t read them. By law and by custom, every upload is entitled to considerable privacy. All private files are protected by very strong encryption and only the owners themselves hold the keys. You’d encounter the same problem if you were to try to scan our servers yourself.”
It was time to take the offensive. “If you want those plans, then we need to know what you know about the lab. What happened there? What have you found out about it? What do you know about this Orion Research company that was running it, and what were they trying to accomplish? If you don’t share what you know then it's very unlikely I'm going to be able to do anything else to help you.”
I sat down in a chair in front of Gaudet’s desk and waited for his response. Awkward as they were, these robot bodies could put on a perfect poker face when you needed them to.
Gaudet’s own poker face was much more impressive given that he had to do it for real. His hands were folded in front of him on the table. His suit looked freshly pressed and starched. His eyes studied me impartially. Was he weighing the odds? Searching for his best move? Gaudet’s office was deep in the NASC building and it was very quiet. I increased the gain on my robot’s microphones. The hum of the ventilation became louder. I could hear Gaudet’s heartbeat now. It was beating strongly. I layered infra-red onto my field of view. Gaudet’s brow and neck were hot. I wondered if inside he was raging like he had so openly at our last meeting. If so he had reason not to show it. At length he spoke. His words were slow and measured.
“Handing over classified information to private parties is not something we normally do. That tidbit we gave you was classified but deniable. It could have come from anyone. If you want real intelligence documentation then we’ll need a signed non-disclosure agreement from VivraTerra. I don't need to tell you the consequences of violating that agreement, do I?"
I shook my head. “Please send the papers to Western Trust. They have signing authority on behalf of the company. I’ll make sure they receive instructions to sign without delay.”
Gaudet projected a file on his desk. “Take this, it’s a decrypting program and key. Use it to decrypt whatever documents I send you, if any.”
I noticed that a nearly imperceptible smile had caught the edges of his lips.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr. Roamer?”
I felt a chill run down my spine. “No thank you. Please consider my request earnestly. I sincerely hope you can give us some useful information. Obviously it’s also in our own best interest as well to track down any uploads engaged in illegal activity.”
“Then I’ll call a guard to show you out. And Mr. Roamer, have a very nice day.”
-------- 22 --------
When I had gotten the robot back into the cab I jumped to my house and sent Mr. Speer the request to have Western Trust sign the non-disclosure agreement without delay. Then I went out on the porch to sit and stare at the waves and the seagulls. Would Gaudet send me anything substantial? Had I misread or misplayed the situation?
A few minutes later, a warning light began flashing near the periphery of my field of view. When I focused my attention on it, the warning expanded into a panel. It read: “Error, connection to robot132 lost. Attempting to restore...”
I tried jumping back to the robot in the cab, but got another error message: “Unable to connect to robot132.”
I opened a map of Vancouver and superimposed the location of my robot. VivraTerra subscribed to a tracking service which monitored the location of its robots at all times via satellite. There was robot132, still hurtling northwest on Kingsway, en route to our building.
One of the error message panels had a tech support link. I punched it. A few seconds later a video call came in.
“Hi Mr. Roamer, I’m James with robotics support. I see you’re having some communications problems with your robot.”
“Yes” I replied. “I haven’t been able to connect to it for over a minute now. Is there a network glitch?”
“Let me have a look." James looked down. "The wireless grid reports no failures. Huh, the robot’s responding to network pings... but it’s refusing to open a connection; could be a software glitch but I haven’t heard of one like this before. Where is the robot right now?”
“It’s in a cab, on its way back to the main office.”
“That helps. I’ll send someone out to fetch it when it arrives. Sorry for the trouble Mr. Roamer. We’ll pick up the robot and repair it.”
The blip on the map representing robot132 stopped moving. It was a little more than a block short of the office.
“The robot’s not moving anymore.” I zoomed in on the blip. “I think it’s on the sidewalk now.”
“That’s not possible.” the technician said.
“I can see it plain as day on the tracker.” I felt the chill of Gaudet’s smile in my spine again. “This is very wrong. I’m going out there right now to get it.”
James began to look worried. “I’m coming too.” he said and killed the video link.
I punched in a request for a new robot and soon found myself back in the VivraTerra robot storage room. A second robot came alive and stepped out of its alcove.
“James?” I said. The robot nodded.
“Let’s go.” I turned and ran out of the room and down the hall. When I hit the lobby I found the emergency exit and ran through it; James followed. Down two flights of stairs and out onto the street. The sidewalk was crowded as usual and many of the pedestrians turned to stare at us. James and I did our best to weave through the crowd but the robots were ungainly and it was slow going.
Then I caught sight of robot132. It was sitting on the chest of a young man. Its knees were pinning the man’s arms to the sidewalk. The man was yelling at the robot to get off. I started pushing and shoving to get there faster.
Then as if in a dream, I saw robot132 pin its victim’s head to the sidewalk sink its other hand into the man’s eye socket. It smoothly ripped out his eye. I could see part of the optic nerve hanging from the bottom of the eyeball like string, dripping blood. The pinned man began shrieking at the top of his lungs.
I desperately pushed my way forward but I was still too far away. I saw the robot drop the first eye and smoothly pluck out the second. The screaming man struggled desperately but could not dislodge the heavy robot.
The stunned crowd had begun to react. One man between me and the robot misinterpreted my intentions and began to push and shove back. The software regulating my interaction with my robot recognized a potential risk to humans in my behavior and dialed back my available strength, making it an unfair shoving match.
Robot132 curled its hand into a fist and struck its victim square in the face. Then it did it again and again. As the blows fell the man’s shrieks turned to grunts and then he lay still. The robot continued until it had broken most of the bones of the man’s face and was sinking its fist deep into his head.
One of the pedestrians closest to the scene recovered from the shock of the moment and started to act. he grabbed the robot from behind by its waist and hauled it off the victim. The robot gained its feet, turned and sank its knuckles deep into the hero’s neck. The man sank to his knees gagging and coughing. The robot kicked him in the head and he fell to the ground and lay still.
I watched helplessly as the robot grabbed the nearest woman by the wrist, snapped her arm and then her neck. Now the crowd began to surge way from the robot, carrying James and me along with them. We were pushed to the ground and trampled as the humans retreated.
When the crowd had passed, I sat up and took stock. My robot host appeared to be mostly unharmed. James was coming to his feet beside me. Robot132 was staring at us from 20 meters away.
I heard sirens. James started to turn back for the VivraTerra building but I grabbed his wrist. “No, we have to appear to be trying to stop that robot!” I yelled.
I turned back toward robot132 but by now the police had arrived and officers were rushing out of their cars. I raised my hands in surrender and James followed suit. Robot132 stared at them impassively. The cops weren’t interested in arresting us. They opened up with their shotguns and handguns. Our robots are tough but they’re not built for combat and they’re certainly not bulletproof. As the rounds struck I felt bright flashes of pain at the highest level allowed by the simlet. Warning messages began popping up in my field of view, and I began losing subsystems. My perspective shifted wildly as my robot fell to the ground, and my virtual body in the simlet did the same. Several of my robot’s peripheral camera eyes shattered when its head hit the sidewalk and parts of the world stuttered and froze as my simlet became starved for new information. Then I lost the feed entirely.
I found myself laying on my side on the porch, where I had been before I jumped into the second robot. The error panels had all vanished to be replaced by a single warning: “Unrecoverable damage to robot 51. Connection lost.”
-------- 23 --------
I curled into a ball. Without thinking, I flashed an emergency message to Melanie and Mr. Speer: “I need you two at my house right now!”
Melanie found me first and rushed over to me. She dropped to one knee beside me and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Jarrod, what happened?”
Mr. Speer materialized behind her. His presence embarrassed me and I struggled to shrug off the after-effects of the trauma. I pulled myself up into a sitting position and Melanie helped me to my feet and walked me over to the nearest chair. A glass of water materialized on the coffee table beside me. she picked it up.
“Take two deep breaths... now drink this.” I obeyed.
“Now, tell me what happened.” said Melanie.
I looked at Melanie and then at Mr. Speer, who had pulled up a third chair beside us. Then it started to gush out. “I was on my way back from my second visit with Gaudet and then I lost my connection with my robot. Someone took control of it and used it to kill three humans on the street. I saw it happen. Then I was shot by police in the other robot body I had put on to try to stop the first robot.”
“Jesus.” Melanie said. “Are you ok?”
“I’m a bit shaken up. The killings were horrible and I couldn’t stop them because I was too far away. Then the cops shot me to death; or rather my robot, but it felt awful. The robot that attacked the human, I’ve never seen a robot move like that before. It was reacting so fast. Our control interface would never support that kind of agility. I don’t know how they did it.”
Mr. Speer leaned forward. “Jarrod, do you know who took control of the first robot?”
“I don’t have proof, but it must have been Gaudet and the NASC.”
Mr. Speer nodded. “It makes sense. This is going to create an international media circus. Most of the public is already uncomfortable with the idea of uploaded people, and a sizable fraction openly oppose us. Many will see this as a call to action. The NASC is sending us a very clear signal. We give them what they want and this will all blow over. If we don’t, then they’ll have an excuse to move against us without exposing their true motives, and without suffering a public backlash.”
Mr. Speer’s expression softened. “Jarrod, there’s going to have to be an investigation into this event. You’ll be contacted by VivraTerra’s internal police, probably quite soon. I’ll send you some instructions on how to deal with them. In the meantime I think you should take a little time to regroup. You’ve had a shock to your system.”
Melanie said. “That’s right. Come on Jarrod. I’ll take you someplace where you can recoup for a while.”
I nodded. “Alright. Until Gaudet comes through with some more information I don’t have anything to go on anyway.”
Mr. Speer stood up. “Good. In the meantime I’ll have to start damage control. I'll see you later.”
With that he was gone.
-------- 24 --------
Melanie took my hand and brought me to my feet.
“Follow me.” she said.
I followed her into the bedroom where she rifled through my closet and pulled out a soft white bathrobe. “Put this on.”
I blinked my work clothes out of existence and wrapped the robe around me.
Melanie curled her fingers around mine.
"Take a deep breath." Then we jumped.
The ground felt suddenly cool to my bare feet. We were standing on grass and green moss. Surrounding us were the thick trunks of evergreen and maple trees. They cast a deep shadow over a forest floor. Ribbons of light slipped through the leaves and played over the grass. Roses, rhodos and green bushes were scattered about but there was plenty of room to move freely between the trees. I heard birds calling in the branches above and the wind rustling the treetops. The air was cool but not cold. It was moist and fragrant.
“This way.” Melanie led me down a gentle slope. I could hear a stream somewhere ahead of us. “This is a private sim I’ve been building. It’s nothing particularly original, but it’s a good place to decompress and a nice change from the sun and sand of Polynesia.”
We walked down the trail together. The stream came into view ahead of us. It was small and shallow. The water gurgled around stones, some partially covered in moss. In front of us, just uphill from the stream was a flat mossy area. On the moss lay a very large oval sheet in deep purple. It was covered in pillows and silk sheets.
“Come on.” Melanie sat me down onto the sheet and covered me with one of the blankets. I propped myself up on a pillow and looked up at her. She was wearing a flowing green dress with bare arms. Flowers had appeared in her hair. Standing beside me, she raised her arms in a graceful gesture and her clothes began to shimmer. Slowly they became translucent, then wispy, until they wafted away like morning mist. There she stood in her full beauty. Her wavy brown hair playing around her shoulders and breasts. her dark brown eyes gazed at me. Her curves beckoned. She sank down and joined me under the sheets.”
Deep inside Melanie’s fantasy, under her rustling leaves, warm beneath her sheets, I took a deep breath and began to feel better.
-------- 25 --------
Melanie slipped away some while later. As I slowly returned to consciousness I became aware of the sound of the creek, and then the birds and the rustling leaves. I lay still and enjoyed the moment.
The forest was exactly as before, and would remain that way, forever unchanging as long as I stayed here. Were I to leave, the sim would be empty. The software governing it would then shut it down. All of the clever algorithms controlling the flow of water around the stones in the creek would be halted. The birds would cease to be, the little AIs governing their behavior terminated. Details such as the placement of the pillows and sheets would be noted and saved so one day they could be restored just the way we left them. Less important details such as the angle and state of each blade of grass would be forgotten. An apocalypse of nonexistence would engulf the entire forest as the computing resources that supported its existence were re-allocated to other tasks. Right now though, this little world existed only for me.
Then one day Melanie or I might decide to return here. In the span of just milliseconds, the parameters and specifications for the sim would be looked up and pored over by powerful algorithms. The ground and trees would be recreated, the laws of a Newtonian physics model would take hold and gravity, sound and light would come to be once again. The birds would pop back into being as their little bodies and minds were instantiated and resources allocated to support their existence. A tiny genesis would unfold inside the banks of VivraTerra’s servers and Melanie's lovely forest would come to be once more.
-------- 26 --------
I sat up. There were several messages waiting for me. The first was from Emma, telling me to rest up and not to worry about her. The second was from Gaudet; a big encrypted file over 5 GB in size. That was encouraging. The third was from VivraTerra’s police authority ordering me to report for questioning at once. The fourth, a message from Mr. Speer with some instructions for dealing with the police. I read the last letter over carefully.
If I was going to be tied up with the police perhaps Melanie could make some headway with Gaudet’s files. I launched the decryption application he had given me. The sim recognized the application for what it was and created a three dimensional representation of it; this turned out to be a short black plastic pipe with a big green arrow down one side. I held the pipe with the arrow pointing down and dropped the icon for Gaudet’s encrypted file into the top hole. A folder icon fell out the bottom. I picked it up, expanded it, and looked inside. There were several documents, photos and even a few video files inside. Pleased, I re-iconified the folder and sent copies to Melanie and Mr. Speer.
Next I turned to the police summons and found a teleport link at the bottom of the message. After a quick wardrobe change back into my business clothes, and with a last wistful look at the forest Melanie had shared with me, I hit the link. My surroundings took an immediate turn for the worse. The trees and streams of the forest were replaced by the four walls of an interrogation room. The room was large, nearly 20 meters to each wall. The floor, walls and ceiling were all white. An oval conference table of black hardwood, and white leather chairs were set up in the center of the room. Along the walls were stone statues in the Greco-Roman style, all showing heroic characters with perfect postures and uplifted chins; possibly an attempt to subliminally summon our better angels.
A message appeared on my personal interface: “One moment please. An officer will be with you soon.” I settled into a chair by the table and waited. After an hour's wait, the doors finally opened to reveal two men. They were dressed in VivraTerra’s standard police uniform, which was a white two piece suit with VivraTerra’s logo emblazoned on the jacket and VivraTerra colors on the tie. They quickly strode to the table as I rose to greet them.
“Mr. Roamer, I presume.” I nodded. “My name is Officer Martin and this is Officer Slater. Please have a seat.”
We took our places, with the full length of the table between the officers and me.
“Mr. Roamer. You’ve been involved in a very serious event. A robot assigned to you has killed three humans. We’re here to record your account of yesterday’s events and to determine whether charges will need to be filed against you.”
I nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything less. However, before we begin, I need to make a few requests. First of all, these events are linked to matters of urgent national security. I have here a letter from Mr. Speer, minister of foreign relations, co-signed by Mr. Castillo, head of security, requesting that I not be detained for any length of time. Delaying me at this time could lead to tragic consequences up to and including the destruction of our Polis"
The officers exchanged surprised glances. Officer Martin reached for the letter and looked at it curiously.
“Secondly, I have two copies of a document from Prime Minister Sukoi that you need to sign. This document swears you to absolute secrecy concerning this investigation. You are to be the only officers assigned to this case, and you may share what you learn with no-one. All recordings or documents produced as part of your investigation are to be classified top-secret. Please read the documents carefully and sign.”
Officer Martin looked up from the letter and stared at the two other documents I dropped on the table.
“Uh, we’ll have to double check this with our superior.”
“I understand. Please send the signed copies to Mr. Speer’s and Prime Minister Sukoi’s offices, and call me again when you’re ready. Goodbye for now.” With that I punched the link for my house and made my escape from the interrogation room.
-------- 27 --------
I felt a childish need to celebrate my little victory, so I poured myself a generous gin and tonic and took it out onto the deck. The seagulls, as ever, were circling the rocks below, occasionally swooping down to grab clams from the beach. I watched one ride an air current back up into the sky and then drop its clam from a great height. It fell and smashed open on the rocks, but another seagull swooped in and grabbed the prize before the first one could descend to collect it. Infuriated, the first seagull chased the thief, squawking angrily.
I pinged Melanie and asked her to join me. While I waited, I pulled two deckchairs together and spread out my desktop in the air in front of them. Then I took out Gaudet's folder from my inventory and added it to the desktop. The folder included a video, so I started it and settled down with my drink to watch.
A strangely distorted set of diagonal colored bands filled the screen. Then the bands began to move away from the camera and became stripes on a tie. The tie pulled back and a shirt came into view, then a suit, and the man wearing it: an NASC agent. The camera he had just turned on had a fish-eye lens which explained the distortion. Thanks to the wide field of view I was able to make out the bank of computers, the reactor's vacuum chamber and the large metal cage containing the mysterious high voltage equipment. There was a bright blue glow coming from the window in the vacuum chamber door. Lights were flashing from the banks of computers and the high voltage equipment was humming. The lab seemed to be up and running. To clear the distortion of the fish eye view, I enlarged the video to fill the whole desktop, then curved the desktop until it wrapped clear around my field of view. Now it felt much like I was in the lab itself instead of watching a video of it.
The agent walked off to a corner to join his companion, a dark-haired woman wearing a similar suit. They exchanged a few words and then settled down, apparently for a long shift of guard duty. After that nothing much happened. I began to jump forward in five minute intervals. At around the one hour mark things began to change. The blue glow from the reactor strengthened considerably. One of the agents noted this and walked over for a closer look. The hum from inside the metal cage increased to became a staccato roar. The large metal rings that spanned the inside of the cage started to glow a dull red. The agents were very animated now, talking to each other and no doubt contacting their superiors. The light from the reactor window became like the arc of a welder’s torch, its color shifting from blue to a blinding white.
Suddenly a brilliant bolt of white lightning leaped between two of the rings in the cage; then another, and another. There was a terrific bang and a brilliant flash. The camera temporarily became overwhelmed and showed nothing but brilliant white. When the image returned, I could see the cage was crackling with a storm of sparks, like the finale at a fireworks display. Millions of volts of electricity had suddenly been released in an uncontrolled discharge. Black smoke billowed from melting equipment. The agents fled out the hangar entrance.
There was second terrific bang and flash, this time from the vacuum chamber. The world’s only working fusion reactor generated magnetic fields of unearthly intensity, in the hundreds of Teslas. The magnets that supported those fields overheated and quenched, instantly losing their superconducting properties. The immense energy stored in the magnets was released in a single ruinous event. The ground shook and my field of view shifted radically as the camera’s tripod collapsed. Then the light from the window flickered and went out.
Aside from some smoke, the reactor and the cage were now still. The only pieces of equipment still functioning were the servers. They continued humming for another minute or two, then began an orderly shutdown. Bank by bank, they went dark. Soon all was still. I began jumping forward in 5 minute intervals again. Eventually the electrical equipment stopped smoking. About one hour after the fireworks began, NASC agents returned to the hangar in force. Soon there were a dozen of them investigating the wreckage and taking photographs. One of them walked up to the fallen camera and switched it off.
-------- 28 --------
"The log states the camera was set up by the first group of agents to enter the hangar.” Melanie said. I hadn’t noticed her arrival. “Two of them were left on guard duty until a science team could be assembled".
I restored the desktop to its usual dimensions. “Hi baby,” I said. “You slipped away last night before I could thank you.”
Melanie settled into the deck chair beside me, took my hand in hers and gave me a warm smile, “I’d say you thanked me well enough last night. How did things go with the police?”
“Under control for the moment; Mr. Speer convinced the PM to put the whole affair under the cloak of state secrecy, and the detectives can’t proceed until they get new directions from their superiors, which, I have a feeling will take more than a week to sort out.”
“Nice. Well in the meantime I had a chance to look over these files.”
“Anything useful?”
“Quite a bit, actually. Gaudet didn’t hold back. There are details here on how they noticed the lab in the first place, and logs of their investigation.”
“Anything useful to us? For example, why do they think VivraTerra’s involved?”
“One of their satellites noticed the lab by its infrared signature. The hangar was putting out way more heat than its electrical or gas inputs would account for. Apparently the NASC has some pretty smart software designed to search for irregularities like that. After they noticed the lab they put a tap on its comm traffic. It was all under hard encryption, but something like 80% was with the VivraTerra servers, via a series of anonymizing routers.”
“How did they trace the connection through the routers?”
Melanie smirked, “They’re the NASC. I’d bet they secretly own half of them, and the ones they don’t own they’ve probably hacked.”
“Does any of the traffic the NASC recorded match up with our erased comm entries?”
Melanie nodded. “The timestamps are a perfect match.”
“So now we know that the people behind the lab are also the ones who hacked our system.” I frowned, “The NASC must have tried to track the equipment makers like we did. Did they get any farther with Oshiro or any other companies?”
“Quite a lot further.” Oshiro was a riskier target politically being a Japanese company, so the NASC focused on some of the US contractors who were hired to build the lab. Let’s see,” Melanie began leafing through the files on my desktop. “One of them was called Century Robotics. Gaudet’s men interviewed a number of their employees. They installed high bandwidth comm lines and 12 robot alcoves, and filled the alcoves with robots; basically the same model as VivraTerra uses.”
“Didn’t they find all the other equipment in the lab a little strange?” I asked.
“None of it was there at the time. After the robots were up and running they did all the work. Equipment deliveries were dropped in front of the hangar and carried in by the robots. They must have done all the assembly work.”
I shrugged. “Makes sense; if you don’t want anyone seeing what you’re doing or who you are, what better way than a team of telepresence bots?”
“Those robots are still in their alcoves at the back of the hangar.” Melanie added. “All of their programming and log files have been wiped clean.”
I nodded. “Did the NASC find out anything about the people who hired the contractors?”
Melanie shook her head. “All bills were made out to Orion Research Inc. All communication with Orion was via anonymous text messages, money paid up front. When the NASC traced the comm traffic it originated at VivraTerra.”
“What about the owners of Orion?” I asked.
Melanie sifted through a few more files. “Here it is. It’s a front company, like you’d expect. Of course in order to create a corporation you need at least one human owner. In this case it turned out to be some retired guy in Seattle. They took him in for questioning but it soon became obvious that he knew nothing about the company.”
“A case of identity theft then?”
Melanie nodded.
“Did they try to follow the money?”
Melanie frowned. “They must have but I haven't looked yet. Let me check.” She gave the translucent desktop two hard raps with her knuckle. A menu system popped into view above the documents. She selected the search feature and said “Money, Payment, Transaction, go.” Most of the documents faded to gray but three lit up with a neon blue border and came to the foreground.
“Says here the payments ultimately came from a VivraTerra account, number 5AE65B. Hey that’s progress!”
I shook my head. “Whoever these guys are, they went to some length to cover their tracks. If they’ve hacked our comm logs, then I bet you’ll find that the ownership and transaction records for that account are gone too, or point to someone innocent.”
“Ya you’re probably right.” Melanie sighed. “Still, I’ll ask Speer to get someone from the treasury to check for us. It's no wonder Guadet fingered us though. Both the comm traffic and the money trail point straight at VivraTerra.”
“Is there anything in all these files that might help us track down the people behind all this?”
Melanie shook her head. “Nothing I can see.”
I put my arms behind my head and looked up at the sky. The little white clouds were drifting by like they always did.
“You’ve reviewed a lot of these records. Isn’t there anything new you know now about the perpetrator’s actions that you didn’t know before?”
“Well, we know that they’re from VivraTerra or at least have routed their activities through our systems. We know that they used robots to build their lab but that’s not really very useful. We know that they blew up their lab by overloading the equipment with power from the reactor... Hey, I got a lead on that reactor design by the way.”
“Oh?”
“It's a Bussard reactor, originally invented by a Dr. Robert Bussard around the turn of the century. It’s a pretty brilliant design, based on using electromagnets to concentrate a super-dense cloud of electrons at the center of the vacuum chamber. This creates a very strong negative charge in a single point of space. Then you drop in positively charged protons and boron ions. The negative charge accelerates them toward the center of the reactor at super high speed where they collide and fuse, releasing very high energy helium nuclei and nearly no radioactivity. That’s the theory anyway but the research was never funded through to completion. When ITER failed, all the steam went out of fusion research.”
My gin and tonic was empty. I tapped the glass twice with my fingernail and instantly it was full again. “Apparently someone revived the idea 60 years later and perfected the design.” I said. “Does the fusion design they used tell us anything more about who they might be?”
“They’d have to be totally brilliant. The math involved in a reactor like this is mindboggling. Some say nobody but Bussard himself really understood the physics behind it. They’d also need huge computing resources to simulate the design and work out the details.”
“Like those servers in the lab?” I asked.
“I guess. And they might have used some of the equipment in the cage to test the high energy particle collisions.”
“Maybe,” I said “but in the video that equipment was humming with millions of volts, after the reactor had already been finished. The rings were glowing red. It looked to me like all the power from the reactor was going into the cage.”
“That’s true.” Melanie said. “Using some of Bussard’s equations I was able to come up with an estimate of the reactor’s output. Based on the dimensions of the reactor and the intensity of the fields those magnets could produce, the reactor should have been producing somewhere between two and five gigawatts at full power. That’s about the same amount of power that a city of a few million people would need. No wonder the NASC’s satellites picked up the heat signature. There’s no way to hide that much power, concentrated in such a small area.”
“Any idea what you’d use that much power for?” I asked.
Melanie shook her head slowly. “Jarrod, I really don’t have any idea. That’s about a thousand times more power than any industrial process I can think of.”
I grimaced. “So we’re still stuck with nothing but questions.”
“Ya.”
My gin and tonic was empty again and I was starting to feel a bit of a buzz. I grabbed each end of the desktop and brought my hands together in a loud clap. The desktop shrank down to nothing as my hands came together. In my palm I felt the icon it had collapsed into. I put it in my pocket.
“I guess we’re done here for now. Do you want a drink by the way? I’m having gin and tonics.”
“Sure.”
I tapped the glass again, only once this time, and it sprouted a little menu in my private field of view. I selected the “Duplicate” option and instantly a second glass materialized on the little table between our chairs. I handed it to Melanie.
“You know I really need to go see how Emma’s doing. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”
“She’s fine” Melanie said. “Last night she had a sleepover with her friend Sheila.”
I took another sip and sank deeper into the chair. I looked up at the clouds again. “That forest sim you made was beautiful. I don’t know if I’ve ever slept so deeply.”
Melanie smiled, “I doubt my sim can take all the credit for that, you had a pretty hard day yesterday.”
“Still it was just what I needed. Thank you.”
“You know we can go back there anytime.” Melanie smiled playfully.
“Hmm.” I said. I took her hand in mine again and leaned over my chair's arm to place a soft kiss on her lips. We shared smiles then sank back into our chairs. I closed my eyes and listened to the waves and the seagulls. The breeze coming inland from the sea played in my hair. My breathing slowed and I began to drift, enjoying the slight buzz from my drink.
-------- 29 --------
I imagined what the two agents must have felt as they watched that 60 foot cage light up in a hail of lightning. They could have been electrocuted had they been a little closer. Their lives could have been snuffed out in a wink, their souls gone forever.
Was I any different? I owe my existence to my host software. Several dozen times a second it slavishly recomputes the numeric states of my neural net, stored in trillions of blocks of memory. Some blocks represent neurons - each one containing thousands of memory addresses to other blocks that represent synapses - each synapse in turn containing the addresses to thousands of other neurons; trillions of interconnected blocks of memory that in their totality form the astronomically vast network that is my mind.
As long my host software keeps running, my neural net will continue to respond to stimulation from my senses. It will continue to think my thoughts. But what would happen if that program were turned off? The memory used to store my net is not volatile. If power were lost, the last state of my mind, computed by my host program, would continue to be stored in the computer’s memory for hundreds, maybe thousands of years before physical decay corrupted the data beyond recovery. But while the computer was off, I would not exist. Only the potential to restore me to life would remain. My consciousness is more than just a network of neurons and synapses; it is an emergent property of that network in execution. Without my host software continually recomputing my neural net, I do not exist. If nobody ever came to restore power and turn that software back on again, I would face the same fate that awaits every flesh and blood human at the end of their short lives.
I had uploaded with my daughter partially in an attempt to escape death, but now events had brought that black reality back to us. Our existence was perhaps even more tenuous than before. Now it depended on nothing more than the property rights bestowed on a legal corporate fiction, and those rights were far from inviolate.
-------- 30 --------
Some time later, I opened my eyes and turned to look at Melanie. She had closed her eyes and was enjoying the sun and breeze. Her hands were behind her head. Her tanned skin gleamed.
“You know,” I said, “There is one new thing that we know. From the timestamp on the video we know exactly when the lab was destroyed. Could we correlate that with some sort of activity inside VivraTerra?”
Melanie squinted at me and frowned. “We know the explosions line up with some of the deleted comm log entries, but we don’t know who was communicating at the time.”
“What about other activity besides communication?”
“Well, there was an enormous amount of traffic just before and after the lab blew up. Something big was being computed. It might be that they were using computer resources both at the lab and within VivraTerra. I know we track processor and memory usage of each upload so we can charge them for it when they exceed their quotas.”
“Quotas?” I asked.
“I guess you haven’t had to worry about that, but there’s a limit on the amount of computer power you can use freely. Our constitution says that each upload has the right to use enough computer resources to host themselves, their sims and a reasonable amount of personal software. Every few years, we evaluate the amount of resources available and up the limit. Most uploads never come anywhere close to reaching it, but there are some who need more power. They use it to run huge personal sims, or large business applications, or to do science research. Whatever they use it for, if they exceed their quotas, we charge them for the extra computer time.”
“Makes sense.” I said. “So if most people never hit their quotas, then perhaps we might get lucky and see a spike in computer usage for just one person around the time of the lab explosion.”
Melanie smiled. “Jarrod, remember when I wasn’t sure you’d be any good at real work? I take it back. I’ll need permission from the council to see those records, but given the circumstances I think I can convince them.”
“They’ve already given you full access to the com logs” I said. “In for a penny, in for a pound?”
Melanie leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “When this is all over, I just hope they don’t lock me away for knowing too much.” She stood up. “I’ll call you when I’m done looking at the records.” Then she raised her hands above her head and with a flourish, popped out of sight.
-------- 31 --------
It was time to check on Emma. In all the commotion I hadn’t seen her in over a day. I tucked away my desktop, looked up her location and jumped.
Sometimes when jumping into an unfamiliar sim, it’s good practice to jump staring at your feet, then as you slowly look up, your mind has time to gradually take in the new environment. I hadn’t followed that good advice this time, which was why I felt my heart leap suddenly into my mouth. Dominating nearly my entire field of view was a brilliant disk. Red, orange and white bands of clouds moved steadily across its surface. The rest of the sky was dark black, emblazoned with countless brilliant stars. I soon realized I was staring at Jupiter, king of the planets. To add to the disorientation, the disk seemed to be spinning steadily around its center, like a record on a turntable, viewed from above. Now my focus shifted to the horizon, just a few degrees below Jupiter’s disk. It was curved visibly upwards both to the left and the right. In fact the horizon wrapped completely around the planet, encircling it like a round window frame.
I looked to my left to take in a bright green pastoral countryside curving constantly upwards. I continued to follow it until I saw a lake, directly overhead, several kilometers away. From there the landscape descended until it became the ground to my right. I was standing on the inside of a enormous rotating wheel, circling Jupiter in a low orbit. Light and warmth streamed down from a narrow hub at the center of the wheel. Behind me the view looked directly away from Jupiter. I was greeted by a rich starscape. The Milky Way was a brilliant band of white and one star that was much brighter than the others. With a start I realized I was looking at the sun, 800 million kilometers away.
Altogether the scene was breathtaking. The greens and blues of the wheel’s inner surface contrasted sharply with the blackness of space. But dominating everything was the overwhelming sight of Jupiter, so close by.
My eyes drifted back to the terrain to my left. There were little forests and streams and green fields with grazing deer. Before me was a winding dirt road. From my interface, I could confirm that Emma was nearby, just down the trail, so I began making my way forward. Looking ahead at the ascending terrain, I could see that the trail led to an Italian style villa, hugging the side of a small blue lake. Between the lake shore and the villa was a garden, adorned with green bushes, flowers, and marble statues. The garden featured a large stone fountain. Using my super-vision I could see at its center stood a tall Greek nude, Diana the huntress; straight backed and bow drawn, she stood forever primed to let her arrow fly. Her eyes dispassionately regarded her target.
There were two moving figures in the fountain. They were swimming and splashing around the statue. One was Emma, the other was her friend, Sheila. There was a third figure sitting on the fountain's edge. With a start, I realized it was my mother.
I checked my interface. Teleportation was allowed within this sim, so I jumped directly to the side of the fountain.
“Hi Daddy!” Emma shouted. She smiled and waved. Her wet hair was plastered to her shoulders.
“Hi Baby.” I said. Then I turned to my mother and gave her a long hug.
“Hi Mom, I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Emma invited me. She said she wanted me to see this… place.”
“This is Sheila’s sim” said Emma. “Isn’t it great?”
“Stunning” I replied.
Sheila waded over to join us. She too had blond hair, stood half an inch taller than Emma, and wore a green one-piece swimsuit. I turned to address her. “This really is an amazing place. Are the physics all realistic?
“They are” she replied “We’re at a 40,000 km orbit above Jupiter. The station is six km in diameter and spins to produce one gravity here at the surface.”
“What made you decide to build a sim like this?”
“I wanted a nice view, and I’ve always liked Jupiter.”
I turned back to Emma. “Have you been spending a lot of time here?”
“All the time Daddy. Sheila’s given me full access and sim editing permissions, so I’ve been helping her with the landscaping and building up the ecology” She pointed straight up. “I’ve got my own house next to the other lake up there.”
“Ecology?”
“Ya, we’re building a real ecosystem, with an oxygen, carbon and nitrogen cycle, and a real food chain. We even designed the plants and animals so they live and die, have babies, and even evolve naturally. In a few million years you’d see totally new animals and plants living here.”
“That couldn’t have been easy to set up.”
Emma laughed. “Sheila said that if we make the biosphere big enough the ecology would be able to balance itself naturally, and that’s mostly what happened. This wheel has almost ten million square meters of land.”
I turned again to look at Sheila. “Amazing.”
Sheila shrugged. “It didn’t all go smoothly. We had to intervene quite a lot before the natural cycles finally began to stabilize on their own; but the best way to learn is by doing.”
“Is this some sort of school project then?” I asked.
Emma laughed. “No silly, this is Sheila’s home sim.”
I sat down on the fountain’s edge. “Well I for one have never seen a sim this impressive. What do you think mom?”
“I don’t know what to think” Elan replied. “When I was her age I was just playing Farmville on facebook.”
“Farmville?” Emma asked.
“Forget it” Elan laughed. “After seeing this I’d be embarrassed to show you.”
-------- 32 --------
It was good to see my mother involved in Emma’s life again. For over a year after we uploaded she had refused all of my attempts to communicate with her. It was Emma who finally broke through to her. Without my knowledge, Emma had begun sending her grandmother regular letters, sometimes written, but usually in the form of short videos. She had shown Elan her favorite places and activities and begged her to return her calls, telling her how much she missed her.
Then one day out of the blue I received an email from Elan. It was short, just a single sentence:
Jarrod,
I want to talk to you.
-Elan
I had replied with instructions for setting up four fish-eye cameras around the corners of her living room. A few days later she said she was ready, and I placed the call. For the first time in over a year I found myself standing in my mother’s apartment. Elan stood facing me, looking stiff and apprehensive. Her hands gripping each other tightly in front of her. For a moment we both stood and stared at each other.
“It looks like you’re really there.” She said.
“It feels like I’m here.” I replied. In fact I was standing in a simlet, reconstructed using the live data from the four cameras my mother had set up. My mother’s HUDS contact lenses were projecting a three dimensional image of me into her living room.”
“Can I sit down?” I asked.
“Can you?”
“Yes.” I sat down on the couch and gestured for her to do the same. After a moment’s hesitation she took the opposite end of the couch.
“Would you like some tea? No, of, of course not.” She stammered.
Another moment of silence passed. Finally I spoke. “You haven’t answered my calls for over a year. Why did you suddenly answer me now?”
“I still don’t know if this is a good idea.”
“But something must have made you change your mind.”
Elan made a few gestures in the air and the video wall on the far side of the room lit up. It was a video message from Emma. She was dressed in her Polynesian outfit, kneeling inside our hut on a straw mat.
“Hi Granma.” She said. “I hope you’re watching this. I went swimming again today, and Daddy’s teaching me how to sail. It’s a lot of fun. Daddy and I spend all our time together now. It’s really great. But I miss you Granma.” Tears began to stream down Emma’s cheeks. “Please come visit us Granma. I really want to see you again.” The wall went blank.
“Where do you get off sending me tear-jerkers like that?” Elan said. “For the past year I’ve been grieving the deaths of my son and granddaughter. Do you think this makes it any easier?”
“Mom, I didn’t know Emma was sending you messages. She did that all by herself.”
“That… thing, inside the computer. It isn’t Emma. Emma died in Amsterdam.” She cast me an icy gaze. “You killed her.”
I nearly pointed out the obvious contradiction in her logic, but then thought better of it.
“Mom, I’ll never be able to make up for the pain I caused you. All I can say is I’m sorry. But there’s a little girl who longs for her grandmother and wants to see her again. Are you going to keep denying her that?”
“It’s not Emma!”
I knew that there was a whole religious community that was helping my mother to support that conviction, despite what her instincts must be telling her.
“I’ve been with her every day for a whole year since we uploaded. She acts like Emma, she looks like Emma, her personality is Emma’s. She even smells like her.” Whether or not she actually ‘is’ the Emma you knew before the upload is a philosophical question. Your own beliefs determine the answer, so it’s not something I can convince you of; but the point is, she looks and acts exactly like the Emma you knew, and she loves you. For nothing other than purely selfish reasons, wouldn’t you like to be a part of her life? Think of her as a different person if you have to.”
“She’s not a ‘person’ at all.”
“Then what’s the harm in communicating with her? If she really is just a piece of software, then you’re just interacting with a computer. Where’s the harm in that? Just try it for a while. If you don’t like it you can stop.”
“It would defile the memory of the real Emma. Talking to an abomination like that, it’s a Sin Jarrod, a Sin.”
I spread my hands. “That’s what your mind is telling you, but I know your heart is saying something else, or you wouldn’t have called me here. Just see her one time, please. After that you can decide.”
My mother was crying now. I wish I could have reached over and held her, but in this room I was just an apparition. Without warning I suddenly found myself back on the beach in Polynesia. Elan had cut the connection.
-------- 33 --------
A few days later I received another short message from my mother, saying she wanted to see Emma. I replied, asking her to come to the VivraTerra head office the next day.
My mother arrived on schedule. She entered via the door at the back alley, and then found her way to the main lobby. I was waiting for here there, wearing a standard robot.
“Is that you, Jarrod?” She asked?
“Yes mom. Could you please open your inbox? You’ll find a link to a HUDs overlay program there. Please run it.”
I waited a few seconds while she interacted with her personal interface.
“Oh, the robot looks like you now.” Elan said.
“The overlay is projecting my image on top of the robot. Are you ready to see Emma now?”
“I guess so.”
I called for Emma, who was waiting in the hallway. I had been careful to select a child-height robot for her. Like all the robots, it was coated in a soft blue rubbery skin. I had put a wig and a dress on it, and set its internal heaters to simulate human temperature. The result looked hideous, but with Emma’s image projected onto it, the robot would provide the most realistic interaction between Emma and her grandmother I could come up with.
Emma came into the lobby. With the HUDs overlay running, I knew my mother was seeing her true form, not the robot.
“Granma!” she yelled, and ran over to Elan. Elan looked terrified. She took a step back, but Emma didn’t stop until she had wrapped her arms tightly around her grandmother’s chest and buried her head in her shoulder.
“I missed you Granma.” Emma wailed.
My mother stiffened for a moment, but then I saw the ice over her heart shatter, and she started to cry.
“My little Emma.” She said, and stroked her hair.
From that day onward Elan returned to our lives. She still held her religious convictions, but somehow she had found a way to leave them behind in the human world.
-------- 34 --------
Elan was worried about the murder. I was busy weaving a white lie of reassurance when a message from Mr. Speer came in. It was a perfunctory request to meet him at his hilltop office. I hugged Emma and Elan, said my goodbyes, and jumped.
Mr. Speer was sitting next to his fireplace. When I jumped in he gestured for me to join him in the second easy chair. Another coconut and straw were waiting for me on the coffee table next to his whiskey.
“Hello Jarrod, how are you feeling?”
I settled into the chair and took a sip from the coconut. “Much better sir. Thank you for the instructions on dealing with the police. They released me without a fuss.”
“Sooner or later you will have to submit to questioning, but hopefully we’ll be able to delay that until the Polis is out of danger.”
“Have there been any new developments?” I asked.
Mr. Speer nodded. “The human authorities are moving faster than ours. VivraTerra has been summoned to appear before a provincial court judge for some sort of special preliminary hearing. It seems the judge is having difficulty sorting out how to proceed. There isn’t any legal precedent for dealing with the murder of a human by an upload.”
“That’s not what happened, sir.”
“I didn't mean to imply that it had, but the authorities are of course going to try to charge you with murder. From their point of view, the evidence against you is quite incriminating. We have hired a defense lawyer to represent us. I'd like you to be in attendance. The judge may wish to hear a statement from you, and I also need to you to be ready to help deal with any political repercussions from the trial. The NASC will no doubt attempt to manipulate public sentiment to their advantage.
“I’ll be there, sir.”
“The trial starts at 3pm. That’s 2 hours from now. We’ve been forced to physically disable all of our robots until we can discover how robot132 was hacked, but the courthouse is rigged for telepresence so you can attend virtually. Access to the building has been restricted because of the media frenzy this case has started, so you’ll need a certificate to gain entrance.”
-------- 35 --------
The courtroom was at the downtown law courts building at Nelson and Hornby in Vancouver. When I jumped in, I found myself standing in the main atrium. The chorus of shouting could be heard outside. A line of police was holding back a horde of reporters and protesters at the front entrance. I walked over for a closer look. The reporters were all running the courthouse HUDs overlay and so I was visible to them.
“What’s your name?” one yelled.
“Are you an upload from VivraTerra?”
“Were you involved in the murder?”
I ignored their questions and focused on the protesters. Christians, Muslims and Hindus stood together, for once unified in their outrage. Their placards were not encouraging:
“Outlaw Uploads”
"Uploading = Death"
“Crimes against Nature, Crimes against God”
“Just Pull the Plug”
Many of the protesters reacted angrily when they saw me. They surged against the police line and the officers were forced to put their backs into their riot shields.
“Abomination!” yelled one protester.
“Free your soul from the machine, God is waiting!” yelled another.
“Murderer!” screamed a third.
Never before had I been the target of so many hateful glares. I quickly turned away and walked up the stairs to the courtroom. The room itself was small, almost cozy. With rich velvet carpets and beach colored paneling and courtroom furniture. The audience pews were filled with reporters and academic looking types. For every physically present member of the audience, I knew there would soon be dozens more watching remotely.
There by the defense table I found the lawyer for VivraTerra and his aides. I approached and introduced myself.
“I’m Jarrod Roamer” I said. “Sorry I can’t shake your hand.”
“Ahh, the upload who was driving robot132 when it went berserk, and also on special assignment under Gregory Speer, minister of foreign relations. Good to have you here. I’m Anthony Zuckbern."
"Do you think you can fill me in on what this courtroom session is about?"
"Well, when we heard what had happened, we knew that the police's would want to pursue a homicide trial, and given the gravity of that charge, they would request broad search and seizure powers. Since that would include confiscation of VivraTerra hardware, it would present a real problem for you and your polis. To prevent that, we submitted a pre-emptive injunction, requesting that the court deny the police's application for warrants. The police objected, and to settle matters, the judge ordered both sides appear at this session to make our cases, and here we are."
I nodded. Zuckbern continued.
"I’d like you to sit with us here. The session is about to start. Please don’t speak out of turn or volunteer any information. If events play out the way I think they will, the session will be brief and your polis will be safe for the time being."
I nodded again and took my seat.
Zuckbern leaned over and spoke in my ear “By the way, please don’t take what I’m about to say personally. I’ll be speaking from a purely legal perspective, and sometimes the law doesn’t have much to do with the real world or common sense. It’s got a logic all its own.”
-------- 36 --------
A few minutes later the judge entered and struck his gavel. He pressed a large red button on his desk. It began to glow, indicating that the proceedings were now being recorded and broadcast to the public.
“This court will now hear preliminary arguments for Canada vs. VivraTerra. We will start with the attorney for the plaintiff. Mr. Enbridge?”
“Thank you your honor. The prosecution intends to pursue three charges of homicide against VivraTerra and Mr. Jarrod Roamer. We have filed warrants for the confiscation of the equipment involved in the crime, namely VivraTerra's servers and networking equipment and...”
Zuckbern raised his hand. “Objection; I thought the warrant requests were against VivraTerra, not Mr. Roamer.”
Enbridge took the interruption in stride. “Canada vs. CanBright, 2025, sets precedent here. When a corporation is accused of criminal action, it is necessary to identify the authorized agent or employee of the company, who directly committed the crime. That agent plays the role of the defendant, and the agent and the company share responsibility for the crime.”
Enbridge gestured toward me. “In this case, the agent in question is clearly Jarrod Roamer, who was in charge of the robot at the time of the killings.”
Zuckbern raised his hand again. “I believe that in Canada vs. CanBright, the agent in question was defined as, and I quote: ‘a person capable of taking premeditated action and capable of holding a guilty conscience.’ I submit that the software program known as Jarrod Roamer is not a person and was thus incapable of taking ‘premeditated action’ of any kind.”
Enbridge looked annoyed. “Your honor, after 15 years of living with uploads, it should be obvious to everyone by now that they satisfy the requirements for persons capable of conscious action.”
“Are you asking his honor to grant the status of legal personhood to every upload in Canada Mr. Enbridge?” Zuckbern said. “If so, then this trial will take a lot longer than any of us were planning for. There’s also a rather large gathering of Canadians outside this building right now who would want to have their opinions heard on that matter.”
Enbridge turned to the judge. “Your honor, corporate criminal law requires there to be an agent of authority who acted on behalf of the company. Without such a person, we cannot bring the suspect, or VivraTerra to justice.”
Zuckbern said “Precisely your honor. If no person was involved in committing a crime, then how can a crime have been committed? Assuming VivraTerra is even responsible for the actions of the robot at the time of the incident, which we are prepared to refute if necessary, then what we are dealing with here could only be defined as an industrial accident. Robotic hardware and software owned by VivraTerra may have suffered a malfunction, with tragic results. When an industrial accident occurs, the owner of the faulty equipment may be charged with involuntary manslaughter. In this case, the equipment was owned by VivraTerra, which is in turn wholly owned by a Mrs. Inga Kristofferson. Is it the crown’s intention to press charges against her?”
Enbridge scowled, “Your honor that is not acceptable. Inga Kristofferson is a medical patient in a state of suspended cryostasis. She clearly had nothing to do with the killings, and is in no condition to stand trial."
Zuckbern interrupted. “And therefore if the prosecution were to press charges against her, the defense would be forced to ask the court to declare her incompetent to stand trial, on account of her not being conscious, and move that the trial be delayed until such time that she can actively participate in her own defense.”
Enbridge shook his head. “Again unacceptable; she was placed in stasis because she suffered a massive embolism in her brain. It’s highly unlikely that she will ever be revived. So it’s also unlikely that a case against her would ever come to trial.”
The judge leaned forward. “Mr. Enbridge. I am not prepared to grant legal status to Jarrod Roamer or any other upload. I’m quite sure I would exceed my authority if I tried. If you wish to proceed with a charge of homicide, then you will need to identify a legal person that this court can try. If instead you intend to proceed with a lesser charge against Mrs. Kristofferson then please do so, but I would be forced to grant the defenses request for a delayed trial. Other than that I don’t see any way to proceed.”
Zuckbern raised his hand again. “Your honor, I understand the police investigating this case have requested search and seizure warrants against VivraTerra, most notably its computer equipment. They have also requested that they be granted warrants to disable the company's backup hardware, in order to ensure no repeat incidents occur while they pursue their investigation.
The equipment in question is vital to VivraTerra’s core business functions, Also since the company has physically disabled all of its robots, a repeat incident is no longer possible. I therefore move that any warrant for the seizure of that equipment be granted only if the more serious charge of homicide is leveled against VivraTerra or any of its agents. Otherwise, I request that the warrants be denied. If this was indeed an industrial accident, then VivraTerra has already taken the appropriate steps to ensure public safety, and should be given time to diagnose the problem and make the necessary repairs."
“Agreed.” said the judge. “Mr. Enbridge. Would you like to pursue a charge of homicide at this time?”
Enbridge, who was frowning at Zuckbern, turned back to the judge. “No your honor. But the prosecution begs the court for time to review the circumstances of the case and bring charges at a later date if necessary.”
“Very well. Then for the time being your warrants are denied, and this court stands adjourned.” The judge struck the gavel, stood up and left the room without looking back.” The little red light on his table went out.
-------- 37 --------
Enbridge made a few crisp gestures in the air with his hands and then, with a nod to Zuckbern spun on his heel and headed past the emptying pews and out the door. I waited for most of the spectators to leave, and then turned to face Zuckbern.
I curled my hands into fists. "Mr. Zuckbern. This strategy was not in VivraTerra's best interest. You've just started the worst public relations nightmare I can possibly imagine."
Zuckbern smiled patiently. "Mr. Roamer, despite Enbridge's protests, both he and I knew perfectly well how this session was going to turn out. So did the judge for that matter. Given the current state of the law, this couldn't have played out any other way. We all went through the motions in order to record the argument in the court record, for posterity, so to speak."
"Posterity!?" I asked, incredulous.
"This is the beginning of a precedent setting case of real significance. Three people have been murdered, and according to the law as it now stands, there isn't any way to bring the case to trial. That's a gaping hole in our current legal code. These sorts of holes are everywhere if you look for them, and sometimes they fester for decades, but this time three people are dead, and something will have to give. The judge's decision today will be appealed all the way to the supreme court, and at the end of the day, the law will be changed in one of two possible ways. Either uploads will be granted the status of legal persons, so that they can be brought to trial, or corporate criminal law will be changed to acknowledge that computers can make decisions all by themselves, and the requirement to identify a human decision maker will be removed."
"Or uploads will be declared a public threat and the NASC will have us all executed." I interrupted. "Working this case through the supreme court will take years. In the meantime you've just informed the world that uploads can basically kill with impunity. When the public hears of this, they'll be outraged, and they'll feel threatened. It'll arouse their most basic our tribe vs. their tribe instincts. They'll demand to see our heads on a spike."
Zuckbern raised his hands in surrender. "I'm sorry, I really didn't have any choice. For one thing the law is very clear on this matter, and I hadn't filed the injunction, the police would be unplugging your servers right now."
I glared at him. "From now on, before you make any major decisions, I want you to talk to me first."
I dropped my virtual business card on the table. Zuckbern smiled at me sympathetically, but then made a grabbing gesture over the card - a signal for his interface to make a copy of it.
I gave Zuckbern another glare then jumped back to VivraTerra.
-------- 38 --------
There was a summons waiting for me in my inbox the moment I returned. I hit the included link and found myself back at Speer's hilltop office. Mr. Speer was sitting behind his desk, surrounded by a dozen floating video screens. He nodded to acknowledge my entrance but continued to rapidly shift his attention from screen to screen.
“I’m monitoring the more popular news channels and vloggers to gauge the public’s reaction to the court events. As expected, people are reacting fearfully. This is a very dangerous situation for VivraTerra and the other polises.”
I nodded, encouraged to find Speer ahead of the curve.
“Were there no other options available?” I asked. “…something that might have avoided a public backlash?”
“This was the only course open to us to defeat the search and seizure warrants. Our job now is damage control. We need to get people thinking rationally and temper the public’s natural impulse to fear and anger.”
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.
Speer nodded.
“Over the next few days, I’m going to be running a publicity campaign, and you’re the lynchpin. You were the pilot of robot132, which casts you in the role of the villain in the public’s eyes, and the media is falling over itself trying to learn everything it can about you. You’re the one everyone wants to talk to, so it falls to you to defend yourself and the rest of us in the forum of public opinion. I’m arranging an exclusive interview with a top news agency that historically has cast us in a favorable or at least neutral light. This will be the only interview we’ll be giving for the time being, so it will command international attention. I need you to be ready.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. “Do you mind if I sit down, sir?” I asked.
Speer smiled and gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk. I took my seat gratefully.
“I’m not going to send you in there unarmed.” Speer said. “You’ll have a team backing you up. Right now they’re putting together a series of arguments and facts that should help you convey our position effectively. We’ll be monitoring the interview in real time and teleprompting you all the way. At every turn you’ll have a roadmap in front of you to help you make your case.”
“Shouldn’t I be helping them?” I asked.
“They'll brief you tomorrow, a couple of hours before the interview. In the meantime the best thing you can do is to rest so you’ll be at your best when the time comes. So go home, spend some time with your daughter and try to put this out of your mind for the time being.”
-------- 39 --------
I thanked Mr. Speer, jumped back to my house and sat down at the kitchen table. Emma's school desktop was there, but she wasn't around. I pulled up my interface and sent her a quick message. "It's getting late, do you want to do homework before or after dinner?"
She replied a minute later. "not hungry."
"Ok, but we still need to do some homework. Come home."
"Maybe later."
I frowned at her last message. Emma normally enjoyed learning and most of her assignments were fun for both of us.
I gestured toward Emma's icon in my interface and selected the "jump to" command. An error message popped up. "Unable to jump, no location found". I selected Emma's icon again and selected the "where is" command. “No location found". I selected her icon a third time and punched "Voice Call". A phone appeared on the desk. I picked up the receiver.
"Emma, I can't jump over to you. Where are you?"
"I'm not anywhere."
“Come on Emma, tell me where you are. I’m getting worried.”
“I’m not in any sim Dad.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why can’t I see your location?”
I heard her sigh. "It’s hard to explain. Run my script and you'll see." A little rolled-up papyrus scroll appeared next to the telephone. I unrolled it and studied the contents. It was covered with a computer language I couldn't read. At the bottom was a big red button labeled "Execute". With a shrug, I hit the button. A big warning appeared in my interface, with options to cancel or continue.
"Honey, are you sure this script is safe?" I asked.
"Don't worry Daddy, I wrote it myself. I've run it lots of times."
The warning message was controlled by my personal host software, which had analyzed the script. It did not say that I would be denied access to my interface, or that the script would attempt any alterations to my mind, and I knew such warnings must always be present for scripts that tried to do so. Whatever Emma had in mind, I would still be in control and could undo the effects of the script anytime, so I hit the button labeled "Continue."
The table and desktop were suddenly gone. I was surrounded by total blackness. The sound of the seagulls and waves from the porch were replaced by silence. There was no ground beneath my feet. I felt a sickening sensation of freefall. It was as if I had jumped into a sim of a deep, black cave, weightless inside an asteroid.
Instinctively I tried to flail my arms and legs. The normal feeling of resistance, unconsciously felt, as flesh and sinew fight inertia to gain speed, was gone, as was the feel of the wind running over the little hairs on my arms. With growing panic I tried to bring my hands to my face and once again encountered no feedback of any kind. My arms and legs and face, indeed my entire body, were gone.
I let out a shout of fear and surprise. I heard my voice, even though I had no mouth to shout with and no ears to hear.
"Calm down Daddy. You're ok."
"What is this Emma?"
"It’s what disconnecting from your sim feels like. You can still send commands to your host through your interface, but it won't send you back any feelings from your sim, because you aren't in one.”
"I can’t feel my own body."
"Your body's part of the sim. If you aren't connected to one, then you have no body at all.”
"Then how can I hear you?"
"Because our voice call was never part of the sim. It's a direct connection between you and me."
The oppressing blackness quickly began to overwhelm me. My nerve endings were screaming for signals of any kind. At that moment, I think I would have happily accepted a visit from a nineteenth century dentist.
"Why would you ever want to do this to yourself?" I asked.
"Once you get used to it, it actually feels kind of nice. It helps me concentrate. I can work with my interface, talk to people, or just think, without any distractions. Sheila says that when you're working or thinking, a sim is just noise."
"I'm pretty sure I need that noise." I said.
I made the gesture to call up my interface and with huge relief, saw it appear before me. I selected my home sim and jumped at once. Light and sound flooded back to my senses. With enormous relief I felt solid ground beneath my feet again. In fact, I felt my feet. I was standing in my usual jump-in point in the living room.
Emma appeared a second later, dressed in her light green tropical skirt and bare feet. "Sorry Daddy, I should have told you what you were in for."
"Honey, do you do that a lot?" I asked.
"Now and then; I do it mostly when I want to be alone."
I didn't know what to think. To discard one's senses so completely was not something I could handle. It was like tossing aside everything that made us human.
Years earlier, I had read articles warning that because the polis was so radically different from the sorts of places people used to grow up in, children raised there might begin to behave in unpredictable, unusual ways; but the articles had just been speculation. The first generation of upload children were still growing up, and I had been confident in my ability to raise Emma. This was the first time I thought I might have cause to worry, but for the time being, all I could do was table the issue and do my best to be her father.
-------- 40 --------
We sat down at the kitchen table. Emma’s desktop was still open from before.
“So what do you want to work on today, history maybe?” I asked.
Emma shuffled a few files around and sighed, “Sure”.
I pulled up her history lesson planner. It was a diagram that resembled an upside down tree. At the top was an icon representing the very first history lecture of the course. From there the tree branched downward into various paths, each composed of related lectures and homework assignments that needed to be completed in order. Topics that did not have to be completed in sequence started new branches in the tree. Emma had worked herself a fair way down and had quite a few topics that she could choose from.
“There’s a lecture here about Emperor Flavian that looks interesting.” I volunteered. “Or maybe we should finish the homework on Mithradates. We were supposed to write an essay on how he held off the Romans for so long.”
Emma shook her head.
“Ok, how about the history of the colonization of the Pacific?”
“No”.
“Well, what would you like to study then?”
Emma scowled. “Whatever you want, Dad.”
I shifted my gaze to my daughter. She was slouched low in her chair, leaning heavily on the armrests. She was staring at her knees and feet.
I closed Emma’s desktop and caught the back leg of her chair with my foot, causing her to rotate and face me. “What’s wrong, Emma?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Something must be bugging you.”
Emma became annoyed. “Let’s just get this homework done, ok?”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong. I know you Emma. Something’s got you upset. Come on, spit it out.”
Emma crossed her arms. “You’ll just say it’s stupid.”
“Come on, Emma. When have I ever called you stupid before? Just tell me, I promise I’ll listen.”
Emma looked out the window at the empty blue sky. I sat back and waited.
After a while, she said, “Remember that project we worked on to list the planets most likely to have life on them?”
I nodded.
“Remember how I said that we couldn’t actually find out if there was life on them or not? I showed the assignment to Sheila and she said she’d think about it. This morning she called me and showed me what she had done. Here… “, Emma made a few gestures in the air and a new desktop appeared on the table. She picked up a large page full of diagrams and equations and angled it for easy reading. Then she let go and the page remained free-floating in the air.
“This is her design for a telescope. It’s made up of a cluster of about 1000 satellites, all circling the sun in an orbit outside of Mars. They’d be spread out evenly along the same orbit, so the sun would be ringed by them. Each satellite would gather light using a 1 meter primary mirror, quantum entangle that light with the light of a laser, and shoot the laser beam at another satellite that would hover above the sun’s north pole, using a solar sail to keep its altitude. That satellite would gather the signals from each of the 1000 smaller satellites, and combine them to form a single image. The whole thing would act like a huge telescope with a primary mirror nearly as big as the orbit of Jupiter. Sheila said it could image a tree on a planet 400 light years away. You could use it to directly study life on other planets.”
I frowned. “I’ve heard of something like this. Haven’t astronomers been combining light from telescopes for a while?”
“Ya, but only from telescopes a few meters apart, never from ones millions of kilometers apart. Sheila said she knows how to build this thing. She said no-one’s ever thought of the quantum entanglement bit before. She says she’s sure it would work.”
I glanced at the equations on the diagram, but they were far beyond my limited math skills. “Are you sure any of this makes any sense?” I asked.
Emma spread her arms. “That’s just the thing, I have no idea. I can’t understand any of this stuff. I mean I’m still working on kinematics and pre-calc. I don’t know a thing about this quantum mechanics or relativity stuff. She tried to explain it to me but it was hopeless.”
“Isn’t Sheila just a year or two older than you? Isn’t this a little advanced for her class too?”
“She isn’t in any classes at all. She just studies whatever she wants.”
“So it’s bugging you that she understands all this stuff and you don’t.”
Emma nodded. “What’s the point of taking all these classes if you can learn all that on your own? Would I be just as far ahead if I did it on my own too?”
“Well you’re already years further ahead of where I was at your age. I always thought these programs were great.”
“But this is real stuff that could change the world, and Sheila’s doing it now. I’m stuck studying Greek history. What’s the point?”
“Honey, I think Sheila might be one of those special types to whom math comes very easily. I think you should feel lucky to have her as a friend. She could teach you a lot, but you don’t have to be jealous of her. You’re doing great yourself, and there will always be some people who learn some things faster than you. You’ll be faster at other things.”
“I don’t know. It’s the same thing with the Jupiter sim. She adapted genetic algorithms to the animal and plant software to let them evolve. She did it in only a couple of hours. I tried to keep up but she was going so fast. Sometimes she makes me feel like an idiot.”
“You don’t have to be jealous. You’re beautiful and smart and lots of fun, with many talents of your own. You’ve got nothing to feel bad about.”
Emma swung her feet in front of her. “Maybe… Dad, do you mind if I just go to the beach for a swim? I’ll catch up on the homework tonight.”
I smiled. “Ok honey, if I’m still free I’ll do it with you after dinner.”
“K. Bye Daddy.” She gave me a sad, half smile and blinked out of her chair. I shook my head.
-------- 41 --------
“Welcome to a very special presentation here at CNNBC. My name is Mike Hornbrook and I’ll be your host tonight as we investigate a topic of special importance. Two days ago, Ali Nassif, doctor and devoted family man, became the first person ever to be murdered by a robot, allegedly controlled by an upload. Then earlier today, a British Columbia provincial court judge ruled that the accused upload could not be tried for murder because he is not legally a person. What does this mean for Justice and for public safety? To shed some light on the issue, CNNBC has assembled an esteemed panel of guests, representing the best of the world’s religious, political and academic traditions. Allow me to introduce…”
I was seated in a comfortable low-back chair at the center of a semi-circle of the guests CNNBC had gathered to spar with me. Directly across from our semi-circle were two more seated avatars. The first was Mike Hornbrook, senior journalist and news anchor for CNNBC. The other avatar represented the audience. The avatar’s location informed the speakers of the audience’s default perspective, for those who were viewing the discussion using an old fashioned two-dimensional video screen. The audience avatar could also be driven by members of the audience selected to ask questions.
The chairs were arranged around a raised circular platform, in what appeared to be a large corner-room of a tower in New York City. The floor to ceiling windows framed a real-time view of central park as seen from 40 stories up.
The sim was hosted by CNNBC. Being an upload, it felt utterly real to me. The other participants were human. They were seated in various buildings around the world. Cameras mapped their body movements and facial expressions onto photo-realistic avatars, and their HUD contact lenses projected images from the sim into their eyes. The illusion of being in the sim could be maintained for them so long as they didn’t try to stand up and walk out of range of the cameras recording them. The end result was a fairly convincing illusion that we were all seated in the same room, when in fact the participants were each hundreds of kilometers apart.
Hornbrook began introducing the experts one by one. They were from my left to my right Robert Pulzer, a republican and member of the US senate, Cardinal Henri Girard, who presided over some sort of Vatican think-tank on law and religion, Guneet Samji, a former justice of the US supreme court, Jessica Parker, professor of philosophy from the University of Pittsburg, and Hassan Allawi, a highly ranked Islamic cleric from the victim’s religious order.
Hornbrook left my introduction for last. “And now for the last of our guests tonight, Jarrod Roamer. Mr. Roamer is not a human being. He is an upload, and as most of you already know, he was the one driving the now famous robot132, just before it killed Mr. Nassif and the two bystanders who tried to help him. Mr. Roamer, your polis has already released a statement claiming that you were not in control of Robot132 at the time the murders took place. Is that true?”
“Yes, that’s right. In fact, at the exact time of the killings, I was driving one of the other two robots that were trying to intercept robot132 and stop it."
“Do you believe that robot132 began to act on its own initiative then?”
“No, the robots don’t have the ability to act autonomously. Someone hacked the communications between VivraTerra and the robot and took control. We don’t know who.” I lied, not wanting to drag our dealings with the NASC into the picture.
“In your own words, could you walk us through the course of events that led up to the killings?”
I recounted my story, beginning with my taxi ride back from the NASC office, but I left the point of origin out of the story, hoping Hornbrook wouldn’t ask.
“What sort of technical ability would be needed to seize control of one of your polis’ robots?”
“I’m not a robotics expert, but I do know that we employ very strong security.”
“So who would have the resources to pull something like that off?”
“Again, I’m no expert but I’d say it would probably have to be a very large organization; a multinational company or a national government perhaps.”
“And why would such an organization want to take the life of a family doctor in Vancouver, Mr. Roamer?”
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know. That will be up to the investigators to determine."
"Then what would be your best guess?"
I waited for the recommendations being sent to me by Speer's team to be updated. Finally they read "Claim frame job. Don't mention NASC".
"This is only my personal belief. As you know there are many groups in the world who distrust and fear uploads. I believe this was an attempt to destroy the public's trust in uploads, by framing us and making us out to be a threat. But the truth is, in the 15 years that the polises have been in operation, I’m the only upload who has ever been accused of committing a crime. Given that there are over 5 million uploads in the world, that's a pretty amazing statistic. No human community of similar size comes anywhere near to a crime rate of zero."
Hornbrook said "And that brings us to the key question on everyone's mind. In court today it became clear that in our current legal system, Uploads who commit crimes cannot be brought to justice. How should the public react to this, and how should the laws be amended? Let’s begin with you, the Honorable Mrs. Samji, could you please summarize for us the legal problem as you see it?"
Guneet Samji straightened up in her chair "The law currently treats uploads as corporations. This grants them the same rights as any normal company, namely to engage in commerce, enter into contracts and to sue or be sued. But most nations do not recognize a corporation as an entity that can be tried under criminal law. When a crime occurs, the "corporate veil", so to speak, must be pulled back, and the human actors behind the corporation exposed, so that they can be directly held accountable for their crimes. Of course the problem here is that there are no human actors pulling the strings behind an upload's corporation. Instead of a flesh and blood human being, we find instead a self aware, intelligent software program, which the law does not recognize as a person capable of criminal acts."
Jessica Parker interrupted "Mrs. Samji is absolutely right, and from her summary it should be obvious that the only reasonable way to resolve the problem would be to officially recognize uploads for what they are, which is to say, as people."
Hornbrook said "And that brings us to the deeper philosophical question. Can an upload truly be considered to be a person? Cardinal Girard, let's hear your opinion first."
Girard, spread his hands "Well Michael, I don't know if it's appropriate to delve fully into the philosophical question of personhood. After all, what we're discussing here is whether we can justifiably bestow the legal status of personhood to uploads, which is quite a different question from asking whether uploads are people, in the moral sense. After all, in law, a person is a legal actor on the court's stage. Historically, not even all human beings were granted that status. For example slaves were considered property, not people, and even into the 20th century, many nations did not recognize women as legal persons. Through their corporate fictions, uploads have already been granted limited personhood, so the real question now is whether that status should be expanded to something closer to that of a human person, so that they can be held accountable for criminal actions."
Samji was nodding vigorously. Hornbrook rephrased his question. "Alright then, Cardinal, what is your opinion on that question?"
"Well, I believe the difference between a corporate person and a real person is that a real person is blessed with a living spirit and soul. A corporation is just a legal fiction and has no soul. Without a soul, it is incapable of mens rae, which is to say, a guilty conscience. Mens rae is an essential component to criminal law. In order for a crime to have been committed, there must exist a perpetrator, capable of holding a guilty conscience. So that is what we need to ask ourselves: does an upload truly have a mind, spirit and soul, like every human being does, capable of mens rae?
Well the position of the Holy Church is very clear on this. The eternal living spirit and soul is a creation of our heavenly father. During life it is temporarily tied to a flesh and blood human body, and when the body dies, the soul is returned to its creator. An upload is a piece of software, running inside of a computer. It is a creation not of God, but of the work of human hands. To believe that it possesses a living spirit is nonsense. The soul is something which is beyond the scope of the natural world, it cannot be measured by any scientific instrument and it most certainly cannot be duplicated in a set of computer instructions. When an upload is created, the original human body is killed. Thus the soul is released from the body and returns to the Creator. An upload is merely an echo of the body that once was, a shallow copy if you will, but one completely devoid of the living spirit and soul that the human body once possessed."
Girard sat back in his chair and folded his hands. Hornbrook turned back to Jessica Parker.
"Mrs. Parker, as a philosophy professor, what do you make of the Cardinal's position?"
"Well I'll try to stick with the Cardinal's very correct conclusion that the question before us is that of mens rae. The Cardinal's position is that in order to have a guilty conscious, you have to have to be in possession of some sort of supernatural spirit or soul. Well I for one don't believe in supernatural souls any more than I believe in fairies or unicorns. In order to believe in souls, you have to ignore mountains of evidence that prove otherwise, and on top of that, you then have to hold beliefs that are by their very definition, untreatable and un-falsifiable.
Religious people have traditionally defined the soul as something that bestows consciousness on what would otherwise be a mindless body. In my opinion, that belief stems from the inability of religious people to understand how a mind could possibly exist, purely within the natural world. But they ignore the progress made over the last two hundred years. In that time, we have identified the purpose and function of virtually every region of the human brain. We may not understand completely how they do what they do, but we have mapped them and we understand their purpose.
Every time a new function of the brain is identified, such as memory for example, the religious will claim that the soul may rely on the brain to handle memory, but the soul is still responsible for the vital actions of cognition or emotion. Then when we sort out how the brain handles cognition, the religious back up once again and say sure, the brain handles rational thinking, but the soul is responsible for emotions and the sense of spirituality and impulses to do good or bad. But over the last two hundred years, we have identified and categorized every single brain function needed to define a human mind. Correspondingly, the role that the soul is purported to play, has been reduced to nothing whatsoever. If we can’t even name the functions that the soul is responsible for anymore, then why should we continue in the belief that the soul exists at all?
In fact, if there were such a thing as a soul, then uploads like Mr. Roamer here, being the creation of human technology, could not possibly have one; and the lack of a soul should be evident as some sort of character flaw. But I personally know several uploads very well, and from what I can see, they exhibit the full range of human behaviors, from emotionality to spirituality, rationality, creativity and art, and most importantly, the capacity to love. In every way I can think of, they are people, just like us.
So if you ask me whether an upload has a mind capable of mens rae, then I say the answer is certainly yes", Parker gestured toward me, ''... and to deny that is to ignore the overwhelming evidence sitting right before our own eyes. If in plain sight of this evidence of personhood, we continue to deny them their just legal status, then we're just imposing a hypocritical double standard for our own advantage, just like American slave owners did before the civil war."
Senator Pulzer, spoke up. "Now hold on, it's not that simple. This is a slippery slope. All people born in the United States become US citizens. Do you think that an upload has the right to vote too? Should they be able to run for political office? Are the American people ready yet have a computer for president? New uploads can be created instantly. There's almost no limit to the number that could be hosted and they could be out-voting humans within a decade. I think that Americans should have the right to define through a democratic process who its citizens ought to be; it shouldn’t be dictated by the courts.”
Pulzer leaned forward and stared pointedly at the audience avatar. “Uploads have a radically different agenda from humans, and if we give them human rights, they could soon pose a terrible threat to us."
Parker scowled, "I'm not aware of any threat posed by uploads."
Pulzer continued "They've only been around for 15 years. They're just getting started, and their current lack of rights is making them very careful. Think about it. They never age or die, so over time, they'll just keep getting richer and richer, and in the end we'll end up with an immortal, machine nobility in control of most of the nation's wealth. Think about this too: an upload can live on 1000 times less income than a human. All they need is a computer and some power to run it. Resources keep getting more and more scarce. Humans could easily get priced out of the market. How would we feed ourselves then?"
Notes were flashing wildly across my huds, so I put up my hand and said. "I agree with Mr. Pulzer." That got everyone's attention. "The political and economic needs of uploads are radically different from those of humans, and I don't think it would do either group any good to be treated as equal citizens of the same nation. But not all people in a country are citizens. Consider foreign workers or visitors. They're granted temporary visas that gives them limited status, but under the law, they're still considered to be persons with human rights.
I think that would be the proper model to follow. We uploads have no interest in national citizenship. Inside our polises we govern ourselves according to our own laws, and our interaction with the outside world is frankly quite limited. We have very little need for money and don't spend much time working for it; so we have no incentive to drive wages down. When we do work, we demand the same fees as humans do. Really all we need from humanity is recognition of our right to exist, and the right to earn enough money to keep our servers running. The proper relationship between polises and human countries should be like those between friendly nations, and when we enter your country, we won't demand the right to vote, we just want to be recognized as foreign visiting persons, and to be afforded legal rights of persons; the right to Life and Liberty and Security to start. That's reasonable, I think."
The panel was silent for a moment, then Pulzer spoke up. "If you're proposing that we treat Polises like foreign nations, then you have to admit the eventual possibility of war. At the end of the day, what we have here are two different intelligent species, living on the same planet. The newer one is capable of growing far faster and using resources far more efficiently than the old one, and we all knows what eventually happens to the older species, don't we?
While we have to worry about putting a roof over our heads, feeding our children and fueling our cars, you can sit there all day long and dream up new ideas and technology. What do we do when one day, 100 years from now, you decide that you need some serious resources to build some giant new supercomputers or some other high tech toys? What if we need those resources to live? With all your power, would you still care about the needs of us little humans scratching a living off surface of the Earth, or would you just sweep us aside like some annoying pests?
Mr Roamer, no matter how you cut it, you uploads are an unacceptable threat to humanity's right to self determination, perhaps even its very existence. For that reason alone, I don’t think we should even be thinking of granting you the rights and privileges of personhood."
Hornbrook said. "Well I believe that Mr. Roamer certainly needs an opportunity to defend himself from that accusation. Mr. Roamer, are uploads a threat to humanity?"
I ignored my huds and started in at once. "Of course not, and to claim otherwise is nothing more than irresponsible fear mongering. My mother is a human. I used to be a flesh and blood human myself, and I think I speak for all uploads when I say we sure as hell don't consider ourselves a different species from you.
If you're really worried about the problem of resources, don't forget that the human population is decreasing. Scientists say that there will be a reduction for a few generations, and the population should then stabilize at somewhere between 4 and 6 billion. We can help you to develop technologies that will let you support that population while maintaining the Earth's natural ecosystems. We want to do this because we consider nature to be just as beautiful and enriching as you do. In fact, most of the sims we live in are covered with trees and oceans and team with natural life.
If we ever wanted to start using ‘serious resources’ like Mr. Pulzer said, it would be totally repulsive to us to do it in a way that would harm humanity or nature. It would also be unnecessary. There's a million times more natural resources available in the solar system than what’s accessible on the surface of the Earth. We don't need food, air, or water, and we're immune to radiation; we could live in space just as easily as on Earth. Why would we damage something as rare and beautiful as the Earth when we have a whole solar system of unimaginable wealth open to us? There is more than enough room and resources for humans and uploads to build the societies we dream of, and we can help each other to do it."
Pulzer leaned forward on his chair. "So you plan to claim the whole solar system for yourselves do you?"
I frowned. "I didn't say that. The solar system is unimaginably huge. Claiming the whole of it would be like a single school of fish claiming all the Earth's oceans. We'd be tiny islands of life in the vast coldness of space. We should treasure the beauty and rarity of what we are, and the companionship and support we bring to each other.
I sat back in my chair and looked at Hornbrook. He said, "We still need to hear from Mr. Allowi. Mr. Allowi, as a prominent spiritual leader of Mr. Nassif’s community, you must be very aware of the impact this murder has had on his family and friends. How are they dealing with the situation, and what do they feel should be done about the legal status of uploads?
Since his introduction, Allowi had hunched silently in his chair. He had occasionally shot hostile glances at me and the other speakers, but mostly he had just looked at the floor; lost, it seemed, in his own thoughts. He was dressed in a white robe and hat, and wore a long gray beard. Now he straightened up and scowled at me.
"I believe that I speak for the majority of the world's 3.5 billion Muslims when I say that we cannot possibly imagine why you are taking the words of this ungodly murderer so seriously."
I frowned, but before I could say anything he continued.
"We all know that these uploads hide deep in their machines, thinking they are beyond the reach of Allah, and there they partake on a daily basis in the most depraved and ungodly acts imaginable; everything from men impersonating women and women impersonating men, and having sexual intercourse that way, to polygamy, sodomy, bestiality, sadism and every other perversion imaginable. They worship idols and false gods of every sort, and now they even reach back into the world of men with their machine hands to torture and murder a servant of god, apparently for no other reason than their own sick pleasure. And yet you sit here beside this monstrous insult to the will of Allah and debate the finer points of law? How can it not be obvious to you what needs to be done?"
Allowi leveled his finger at me. "Mr. Roamer, when you died your soul should have been taken from your body by the angel Azrael and brought before the one true god for judgment. Instead you've perverted the works of science to hide your soul away inside computers. You committed the terrible sin of destroying the miraculous body that Allah had given you. You murdered your own daughter and kept her soul from reaching Allah, and now you have murdered Mr. Nassif as well, who was a good father to his children. Do you truly believe that you can hide from Allah's wrath forever?
Allowi stood up and glared at the audience avatar. "But Allah is the creator of all things. His greatness cannot be denied or ignored. It's time for all believers to show this arrogant kafir how wrong he really is. I call on all true believers to rise up and destroy these uploaded monsters. We are the long arm of Allah. And Allah's wrath will be terrible indeed!"
I blinked. Jessica Parker stood up. "This outrage is exactly what comes from denying uploads their rights." She gestured toward Allowi. "This man has just uttered hate speech in front of an international audience and directly incited people to violence against uploads. If uploads had rights, Mr. Allowi would be on his way to jail right now, but as it stands, Mr. Roamer has no legal recourse against him."
I stood up as well. "Mr. Allowi, I deeply sympathize with your grief and pain in losing a cherished member of your community, but this outburst is unacceptable. You should know that everything I did, I did for my daughter. I felt it was my duty as her father to find the safest and best place for her to grow up, and where I could give her the time and attention she deserved. I find your accusation that I murdered her to be very deeply hurtful and offensive. Also, I repeat that I had nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Nassif and in fact I did everything I could to stop it."
Allowi's shoulders were square toward me. His fists were clenched. He was about to start into another rant but Hornbrook cut him off. "I’m afraid our producers have just informed me that we need to end this program right now." He turned to me and the other panel members "Thank you very much for your participation." and to the audience avatar he said "and thank you all for listening. From everyone here at CNNBC, goodnight." And with that the sim came to an abrupt end. I found myself standing back on Speer's hilltop.
-------- 42 --------
I threw myself down on one of Speer’s chairs. “Shit".
Speer was sitting behind his desk, upright as ever. He had replaced his striped, navy three piece suit with a non-striped two piece gray one, perhaps as an effort to dress down. If so it didn't work.
I asked. "Why didn't we have any warning that Nassif's spiritual leader was such a firebrand?"
He shook his head. "He isn't. We had backgrounds on all of the participants. Based on everything we knew about Allowi, his actions today were out of character. He's a conservative, but moderate. Someone must have found a way to influence him.”
“How?” I asked.
Speer shrugged. “It hardly matters now. I’ve heard of certain drugs that can remove a person’s inhibitions or create hormonal imbalances; or maybe they just had to convince him that uploads posed some sort of threat to Islam or to his community.”
I shook my head. "He obviously had the beating heart a fundamentalist bottled up inside him, and someone figured out how to let it out. The first part of the debate went reasonably well, but Allowi's attack will be all anyone remembers or talks about now. What a fine bunch of 'all powerful post-humans' we've turned out to be. To be honest I wouldn't mind 'sweeping aside' one or two human organizations like pests, right now."
Speer interlaced his fingers and rested them on the table. He sighed. "I can’t deny that the NASC has proven itself very effective in controlling the game. All I can tell you is we’re doing our best to get ahead of them."
We held each other’s eyes for a moment, then I sat back in my chair and looked away.
"Sir, I haven't checked in with Melanie in a while. I should go see what progress she's made."
Speer nodded. "Hopefully if we find the information they want, the NASC will still back down."
"What if they don't Sir, or even if they do, what if it doesn't matter anymore? You heard the Senator's position. I think he'd prefer to see us all deleted. They've probably been thinking about coming after us for years now, and this incident was just the thing to push them into action. Now that the ball's rolling, what makes you think the NASC will spend any effort on our behalf to slow it down?"
"All the more reason to have as many cards in our hand as possible."
I nodded, said goodbye, and jumped back to my house.
-------- 43 --------
I pinged Melanie to let her know I needed an update from her. A few seconds later her reply popped into my field of view. It was a jump link, so I punched it.
I found myself in an unfamiliar part of Melanie's forest sim, standing beside a roughly circular pool of water. The pool was about ten meters across, and surrounded on three sides by moss covered rocks. Behind them were the tall trees of the forest. A cliff climbed up from the far end of the pool. From above it surged a little waterfall. The water splashing down the rocks spread a fine spray over the pond and moistened the stones and bushes around it. The rushing water mixed with the sounds of the birds in the trees. The noon-day sun shone in from the opening in the forest canopy above the pond. Coils of fine mist rose where the sun’s rays warmed the soil. The air was fragrant with vegetation and moist earth.
Melanie was standing in the water on the far side of the pool. Steam was rising from her head as the sun dried her hair. She had clearly been swimming not long ago. Her breasts, just above the waterline, were covered with sun-filled droplets. A large translucent desktop covered with documents drifted in the water in front of her. She had a page in her hand and was studying it intently, not yet aware of me.
I cleared my throat. Melanie looked up and smiled. "You've got mud on your shiny shoes." she said.
I was still wearing my suit from the interview. My shoes were sinking into the wet earth. I laughed, and with a snap of my fingers, the suit was gone. Naked like Melanie, I slipped into the cool water and swam over to her.
"Did you watch the interview?" I asked.
She smiled ruefully. "Ya, it was a lot shorter and a lot more exciting than I thought it would be."
"I didn't even get my full 15 minutes of fame."
Melanie pushed the desktop aside, then reached over and wrapped her arms around my neck. "My poor little celebrity."
We shared a lingering kiss. The desktop floated off toward the waterfall. Melanie grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down below the waterline, then jumped on top of me. The physics of her sim didn't require me to breath. The chill of the water tickled my skin, but the cold never penetrated. We made love to each other, floating and splashing in the cool water.
-------- 44 --------
The desktop had been caught by the waterfall and it was being tossed and rolled by the tumbling water. I swam over and brought it back to Melanie.
"Did you manage to track down our mystery hackers?"
Melanie shook her head. "I'm still working on one long shot, but so far, most of the searches have been dead ends. The council grumbled but they gave me access to the Polis’s compute time logs. When the reactor fried, there were a handful of uploads who were using significant compute resources, but they can all be accounted for except one. The first is a geneticist who was running a huge gene folding simulation to reverse engineer the behavior of some proteins. Another upload works with an environmental non-profit and was running an eco-systems simulation. One guy was even playing Caesar in a ridiculously detailed simulation of the Roman Empire."
"There are no suspicious leads at all?"
Melanie handed me a document from her desktop.
"You actually know her; she’s Emma’s friend Sheila."
I raised an eyebrow. Melanie continued.
"She's using a much larger amount of compute time than the average upload. The privacy restrictions protecting children are so tight that even I'm not allowed to see what she's been doing. Obviously an eleven-year old isn't off designing high energy physics experiments, but we know our adversaries are amazing hackers, so it's possible they may have stolen her identity. I didn't dig deeply into this one though, because the compute resources being used are relatively stable. They overlap with the reactor event, but began weeks earlier, and they're still at the same level today."
I grunted. “Sheila and Emma are running a big eco-system simulation. I think it could account for the compute resources. The sim's really amazing. They've been working on it together for months. You should see it."
Melanie sighed, "Are you sure? That was my only open lead I had left."
“Sheila’s a very smart girl. I wouldn’t put it past her that she could be involved in some way”.
“But as you say, her simulation accounts for the compute resources, and the only other thing we have on her is that she’s bright. There are a lot of smart people in this polis, and many of them are more than 14 years old.”
I grunted. “You’re right. We have no real reason to suspect her.”
Melanie pushed the desktop away in disgust. "I guess I should just float around in this pool until the NASC comes to pull the plug."
“Come on, let’s go back to Polynesia. We can go see what Emma’s up to.”
-------- 45 --------
The next morning, having run out of ideas, I went down to the beach to work on my boat. The day before I had found a straight tree that would make a good mast. With the help of a neighbor from the village I had chopped it down and dragged it back to the beach. Now I was using a small one-handed axe to strip off the soft bark to expose the yellow-white wood below. The mid-morning sun beat down on my back and drops of sweat fell from my eyebrows. I kept up a regular chopping rhythm. The simplicity and repetition of the work felt good.
“Daddy?”
I turned around to find Emma standing behind me. She was wearing her usual light Polynesian skirt and bare feet.
“Hi Honey, what have you been up to since breakfast?”
“Sheila wanted to talk to me.” She clasped he hands together in front of her and then pulled them apart again, holding them at her sides. She looked nervous.
I frowned “What did you two talk about?”
“Dad, I kinda need some advice.”
“Ok.” I sat down on one of the overturned hulls of my boat and dug my feet into the warm sand. “What’s up?”
Emma sat down on the boat beside me. She gestured toward the half-stripped tree.
“That looks like it’ll make a good mast.”
“Do you think you can help me rig it up later today? I’ll need someone to tie the lines from the top of the mast to the hulls while I hold it up. Do you remember your knots?”
“Sure.”
“Good, now what did you want to talk about?”
“Well, I just couldn’t accept that math is so easy for Sheila and so hard for me.”
“We already talked about this honey; some people just have a natural gift for it.”
“I asked her how she learns so fast. She said she just went through all the course programs on her own. She just read the notes and skipped all the homework and that’s all she had to do.”
“hmm.”
“So I asked her how she could do that when I have to watch the lectures over and over and do all the homework, and I still get lots of the questions wrong. She said she never forgets anything, ever. I told her that’s impossible. But she said it was true. Then she picked a day from two weeks ago and told me exactly what we had done that day. She could repeat the things we had said to each other word for word. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Are you sure she isn’t just playing a game with you? Maybe she uses a personal recorder or something.”
Emma shrugged. “I don’t think so, I’ve known her for a long time, and she never has to stop to try to remember or look up anything. It’s always right there fresh in her head when she needs it.”
Emma drummed the back of her heels on the boat. “Then Sheila asked me to play a game. She gave me five numbers and asked me to put them in order and repeat them back to her, all in my head. It wasn’t so hard with five, but then she had me do it with 7, and 9 numbers. I could do 7, but with 9 it was too much. I started to forget some of them. Then she asked me to give her 50 random numbers. She had me write them down in my personal interface where she couldn’t see them, and then read them back to her. Then she gave them all back to me in perfect order. I watched her really close, she wasn’t using her interface at all. She did it all in her head. Then she said she could have done it just as easily with 5000 numbers, or even 5 million, if we had time.”
“Emma, that’s impossible.”
Emma shook her head. “Sheila doesn’t play tricks, at least not on me; and she was being really serious.”
“Nobody can hold millions of numbers in their head Emma, it’s impossible.”
“Dad, Sheila told me that when she was really young, still a baby, her father made changes to her.”
“What?”
“Then when she was older, she got her father to show her what he had done. She studied neurology and artificial intelligence, and then they started making more changes together. She’s been doing it for years now.”
“Emma, that’s ridiculous.”
“But Daddy, I think she’s telling the truth. How do you think she could have built that whole Jupiter sim and all the plants and animals; and what about her telescope?”
I stared out at the waves cresting on the beach, and shrugged my shoulders.
“Dad, I need to ask you something important.”
“What honey?”
“Sheila wants to make the same changes to me that she made to herself. She said if I let her do it, then I’ll be able to do the same things she does.”
I turned and stared at her. Emma gave me a pleading look.
“But I don’t know if I should let her. What if she does something wrong? Or what if I stop being me? I want to be like her, but it’s really scary. Should I do it or not?”
I stood up and stared down at her. Emma seemed to shrink under my gaze.
“If any of this is true, which I very much doubt, then it’s very serious. I want you to call Sheila here at once. I want to talk to her.”
Emma started to weep. “Please don’t tell her I told you. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”
“It’s too late for that. Call her now.”
I sent Melanie a summons. She appeared a few seconds later. “What’s up Jarrod?”
“Probably nothing, but I want you here to see whatever happens next.”
Sheila popped into the sim a minute later. “Hi Mr. Roamer” she said. “Emma said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes Sheila.”
I looked over to Emma. “Emma, you’re not in trouble. Thank you for telling me what you did, you’ve been very good. Now I want you to go to our house and stay there until I come and get you. Ok? Don’t do anything until then.”
“Ok Daddy.” Emma sniffed, and blinked out.
I called up my interface and set up a 3-way private comm channel between Sheila, Melanie and me. Anyone walking by on the beach would be unable to overhear our conversation. Then I walked back to the boat and sat down again.
“Sheila, I understand from my daughter that you’ve made some extraordinary claims. She told me that you’ve been artificially enhancing your own mind for years, and now you want to do the same thing to her.”
Sheila nodded. “Yes, that’s true. I’m confident I could safely enhance Emma’s mental capabilities while still preserving her character and personality.”
“Emma said that your father began the process when you were a baby, but that’s impossible. The Polis’ security protocols ensure that no-one could ever make changes to someone else’s mind, even to their own family members.”
“The polis was only a year old when I was born. Security wasn’t as good back then, and my father was one of the programmers on the core infrastructure team. He built in a back door just for me that we’ve been using ever since.”
“But how can you risk making changes to yourself. It would be impossibly dangerous. You could end up insane or in terrible pain for the rest of your life.”
Sheila looked down at the sand. “Many experiments didn’t go well. My father and I worked out a protocol. We would fork off a copy of me, so there were two me’s. Then we’d make the changes to one of us. My father and the old me would watch the new me very closely for the next several days. If she was in pain or began acting irrationally, then we’d shut her off and go over the data to see where we went wrong. If after a week or so she was doing well, and if her mind was working better than the old me’s then we’d turn off the old me instead, and the new me would become the only me – until the next experiment.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe that. You would have watched yourself suffer terribly, at your own hand!”
“Yes, sometimes it was very hard. Sometimes a broken me would beg us not to shut her down. She would beg to keep living, even though she was crippled. Sometimes it was very hard to erase my other self, but the direct memory of that suffering would always die with the failed experiment, so I don’t remember any of it first-hand. I’m the product of only the successful experiments.”
Melanie gasped, “That’s monstrous. To modify and then kill off failed copies of yourself is criminal. It’s murder!”
Sheila scowled. “It would have been much worse to leave them alive, and it was the only way to make progress. Every copy understood the risks when we got started. We all went into the process willingly. We were all working toward the same goal. Besides nature has been running the same experiment on non-consenting beings for billions of years. It’s called evolution.”
“And now you want to put my daughter through the same process?” I said.
“It would be much more humane this time around. Over the years, through these experiments, I’ve developed a very good understanding of how the brain functions. I’m also much better at handling complex problems than I used to be. I’m confident I could make all the changes in a single session, and there would be no side effects. It’s very unlikely Emma would suffer. She would have her horizons opened in ways you can’t begin to imagine. She would be able to hold all of humanity’s arts and sciences in her head at the same time, and be able to integrate three thousand year’s worth of knowledge from every subject. After that there would be no limit to what she could do, and I would have a friend I could relate to again. You must be able to see the benefit.”
Melanie said “You said that the security back-door that lets you and your father do these experiments works only for you, so this is all academic. Even if any of this were true, you can’t touch Emma.”
Sheila gave her a sympathetic smile. “You don’t understand how much I’ve changed. VivraTerra’s systems are all transparent to me now. For example I’m well aware of the search you and Jarrod have been conducting for the builder of the lab in Utah.”
Melanie’s jaw dropped.
Sheila continued. “You nearly identified me but then ruled me out because of my age. You were close.”
“Are you saying you were involved in building that lab?” I asked.
Sheila nodded.
“Who were you working with?”
“I did it all myself.”
“Were you also the one who destroyed it?”
Sheila nodded again. It was a close thing. The NASC found the lab just as I was finishing my work. As soon as I was done, I melted it down, so the NASC would never know what I was doing there.”
“And what was that?” I asked.
Sheila frowned. “I need to tell you, because I want Emma to allow me to change her, and I don’t think she’ll let me do it without your consent, at least not for several more years. She respects you that much. If I’m going to convince you, then I need you to understand exactly what I am and what I can help Emma become.”
To find out that Sheila wanted my consent came as a relief. “I’m listening.” I said.
“But I want you to swear not to reveal my secret to anyone else. The humans might be nervous about uploads, but if they knew about me, they’d be in a full panic.”
I frowned. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that. I already have a duty to VivraTerra to find the builder of the Utah lab and report my findings, so I’ll have to reveal you to my superiors.
“You can tell them that I built the reactor. I’ll even give you the plans so you can pass them on to the NASC. I don't have any reason for keeping them to myself; but you can do all that without revealing what I really am.”
“There may naturally be some questions about how a 14 year old girl could accomplish so much, but I’ll give you my word that I’ll be as discreet as possible without breaking my duties.”
Sheila nodded. “Once you have the full story, I’m sure you’ll understand for yourself the need for discretion.”
A jump point appeared in front of me, in the shape of a glass ball, supported about four feet off the ground by a narrow glass column. The orb was lit from within by a steady blue light.
“Please follow me” Sheila turned to Melanie. “I’m sorry, but this information is for Jarrod only.”
“Ok, but afterward I need to have a word with you about all these security breaches. You’ve created a big mess, and I need to make sure that nobody can ever do this again.”
“I’ll call you as soon as Jarrod and I are finished.”
“Until then.” Melanie blinked out, leaving Sheila and me alone on the beach. Sheila walked up to the jump point, placed her hand on the orb and vanished. I stood up and did the same, but this time I remembered to look down at my feet before jumping.
-------- 46 --------
I found myself staring at the feet of a robot. I took a step forward and felt it detach from the alcove it had been standing in. The floor was concrete. I was in a huge, dimly lit hangar. There was a dead server farm, a big metal cage, and at the far end, a cylindrical vacuum chamber. This was Sheila’s lab in Utah.
Banks of lights came on, five rows at a time until the entire hangar was lit from above. I appeared to be alone. I started forward to inspect the giant cage. All the equipment was well and truly dead. The heat and smoke had long since dissipated. I noticed that many of the pieces of hardware now bore labels, probably part of the NASC’s efforts to identify them.
My footsteps echoed through the silent building. Ahead of me was the reactor. The door was open, so I stuck my head inside. The interior of the vacuum chamber was a total ruin. Burnt and twisted wires, piping and metal struts were tangled together in a giant knot. Some of the material nearest the door showed signs of having recently been cut with a welding torch. NASC was slowly trying to dissect this mess as well.
“When this thing quenched, it registered as a small earthquake at the University of Utah’s seismic monitoring center.”
Startled, I spun around to find Sheila standing behind me. I opened my mouth to address her, but found myself suddenly overcome with confusion. After a second, that confusion turned into irritation.
“What is this? Am I still in a sim, or are you some sort of projection?”
“You’re not in a sim, this is the real thing.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing a robot like me? Are you manipulating my feed?”
“Everything you see is from the unmodified data stream from your robot’s physical senses. Go ahead and verify the certificates if you don’t believe me.”
I frowned, but brought up my interface anyway. The robot registered as authentic, it answered the cryptographic challenge I sent it correctly, and its data stream was secure. Yet there was Sheila, looking for all the world like a flesh and blood human being.
“Then what is this image of you I’m seeing? Do you have a holo-projector set up here in the hangar?”
“No, I’m quite real.” Sheila bent down and picked up a piece of tubing off the floor. With a smile, she tossed it away over her shoulder.
Exasperated, I threw up my hands, “Then explain how you can be here, because I’m at a loss.”
Sheila smiled. “How much do you know about the structure of the universe at the Planck scale?”
“Not very much”
“It’s discrete, you know.”
“What?”
“What I mean is, at the lowest layer of reality, everything in the universe can be described using integer math. If you take a given distance, and divide it in half, again and again and again, at some point, you’ll find you can’t divide it any further. There is an absolute minimum unit of length in the universe, and all distances are an integer sum of them, with no trailing decimals. When you get down to quantum units of distance, you’re either at location 1 or location 2. To move from one location to the one beside it entails a single jump. At one instant in time, you were at location 1, the next instant, you’re at location 2. You were never halfway between the two, because there is no halfway. The same goes for energy, mass, and everything else.”
“I think I’ve vaguely heard of something like that, some of the more obscure grand unified theories use that assumption” I said.
“That’s right. Of all the published unification theories, Quantum Loop Gravity comes closest to describing how the universe actually works.”
Sheila gestured toward the metal cage. “I built all this equipment, and the reactor to run it, first to determine the true nature of the universe at the Planck scale, and then to manipulate it. What is the substrate upon which all subatomic quantum interactions occur? What regulates their behavior? As a first order approximation, you can think of it as a giant network, or graph, of interconnected nodes. Quantum particles are bits of information that collect at the nodes, and interactions between the nodes always occur via the direct links between them. That is where time comes from, why it can only flow in one direction, and why the light speed barrier is absolute: A cascading wave of interactions on the graph must start at one node, and then travel to its neighboring nodes, and then those neighbors and so on. More hops are needed for interactions between nodes that are farther apart than nodes that are closer together. We perceive that propagation of information as time.
I began to feel impatient. “You said something about manipulating this network?”
“Left to itself, nature will follow its own default behaviors. Cooling metal will form a crystalline lattice; cleared land will fill in with vegetation and eventually forests. But if an intelligent hand interferes, we can manipulate nature to achieve different outcomes. The metal can be flash cooled to form metallic glass, or the cleared land can be tilled and turned to agriculture. By default, the interactions of the graph express themselves as quarks, electrons, photons and such, and on top of those, atoms and molecules and all the rest emerge. But if an intelligent hand could manipulate the graph directly, could it be made to do something more useful? Could it directly host a computing architecture, for example?”
I felt my pulse pick up. “Can it?”
Sheila smiled, “Oh yes, one of virtually infinite scale. I managed to develop tools to manipulate the Planck scale graph. I built a computing substrate on top of it, and then uploaded myself into it, and here I am!” She smiled radiantly.
“Sheila, each of your stories becomes more wild and hard to believe than the one before it. This one is just completely over the top. There’s just no way that what you’re telling me is true, it’s just too incredible.”
Sheila shrugged, “Then how would you explain this?”
She focused her attention on the cage at the center of the hangar. It began to shudder. Suddenly all eight corners began to buckle and deform at the same time. A loud grating noise echoed through the hangar as the corners were forced towards the center. The scale of the buckling increased, and more and more of the metal twisted and deformed. It soon became clear that the cage was being compressed within some sort of invisible, shrinking sphere.
I walked closer to get a better view. Sheila stayed by my side. Her hands were behind her back and she looked smug. “I now perceive reality and can manipulate it directly via quantum graph interactions. This new perspective opens up a whole new world of possibilities. The entire Polis computer architecture could fit within the volume of just a few atoms, were it run on my computing framework, which has been growing exponentially ever since I uploaded myself into it.”
The collapse continued. The square shape of the cage had been obliterated and I was now stunned to see a quickly shrinking ball of scrap metal, floating in the middle of the warehouse. The grating and grinding noise was overwhelming. As the ball became smaller, it slowly began to drift down toward the floor, until it stopped at the height of my chest.
By the time I had walked up to it, the sphere had reduced itself to the size of a basketball. I stared in wonder as it continued to shrink through the size of a baseball. Its color began to change, it started to glow red, and then work its way up the spectrum as it shrank. By the time it had reached the size of a marble, it was a brilliant white.
Sheila faced me on the other side of the ball. Together we watched it shrink until its disk could no longer be seen. Finally, there was nothing but a brilliant, twinkling point of light, suspended in the air between us.
“Everything that was in the cage has now been forced into the volume of a single hydrogen molecule. When I release my hold on it, the matter will be torn apart quite violently by the force of mutually repelling protons. The explosion will prevent the NASC from discovering any more about what I did here. Don’t worry, at this moment, there are no people within miles of the hangar.
The bright star twinkled between us. Sheila looked up at me earnestly.
“Please consider my request seriously Mr. Roamer. Emma is my closest friend. It’s very hard for me to see her struggle under such crippling limitations, when I know how to help her become so much more; and I need a companion at my own level. Right now, I am alone.”
I stared down at the little girl standing in front of me and felt overcome by bewilderment. Was any of this real, or was she just a talented hacker, and was I actually in one of her Sims without being able to tell? Either possibility was terrifying.
Sheila focused on the sparkling point of light between us. “I’ll see you again soon.”
Suddenly I was back on the beach in Polynesia. A notification appeared in my field of view:
“Connection with external robot, Serial #45540939135697, has been lost.”
Hurriedly I pulled up my interface and requested a real time satellite feed of the part of Utah where the hangar stood. From space it was clear that an enormous explosion was blooming in the empty desert. It had already assumed the distinct shape of a mushroom cloud.
Another notification appeared in my field of view, marked as high priority. There was a letter in my inbox. When I opened it I found a massive cache of technical diagrams and dense physics equations. It was the full design and assembly instructions for a centrally focused, inertial confinement fusion reactor.
-------- 47 --------
I sat down heavily on the overturned hull of the boat and put my head in my hands, thinking hard. Had Sheila lied or told the truth? Her claims were so crazy that by the principle of Occam’s razor alone, I knew that I needed to maintain a very healthy dose of skepticism. At the same time, my interface was clearly showing me a verified satellite feed of a mushroom cloud forming over Utah. If that was an illusion too, then Sheila had direct control over my interface, and by extension, my only link to the outside world, virtual or otherwise. She would be able to feed me the appearance of anything she wanted, and I would be utterly incapable of distinguishing between reality and illusion. I quickly backed away from that line of thought. Down that path lay paranoid madness. In the end I decided that the only practical working hypothesis was to believe that at a minimum, the lab really had been destroyed, and that Sheila had been involved in destroying it. Any of her other claims were open to doubt.
With a sigh, I stood up and blinked to my house. Emma was there, dutifully waiting for me as I had asked her to. She sat on one of the couches in the living room, looking idly through the windows at the ocean and sky outside. When I blinked in, she shifted her gaze to me.
“Hi Dad”, she said.
“Hi honey” I sat down beside her on the couch and put my arm around her.
“Did you and Sheila talk?”
“Yes we did.”
“So did she explain everything to you?”
“Yes. She said she and her father experimented with her mind to make her smarter.”
“Do you think I should let her do it to me then?”
I knew I had to be careful. If I simply banned her from doing it, then she might become rebellious and do it anyway. I needed to lay out an argument that made sense to her.
I stroked Emma’s blond hair and smiled. “You know you’re very brave. Most people would never even think of saying yes to such a thing.
Emma, there’s a crisis going on, that’s the reason why I’m working so hard right now. I’m trying to settle some problems that, if they get out of hand, could be dangerous to the Polis.”
“You mean the court case and the TV show?”
“Uh huh. I don’t know why, but Sheila’s mixed up in all this, she might even be at the very center of it. Either way, she’s a very interesting and dangerous girl.”
Emma nodded and waited for me to continue.
“Emma, this isn’t a decision you need to make right away. Sheila would be willing to do it at any time, but once you make it, there’s no going back, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well then I think it makes sense to take our time and to be careful. We shouldn’t hurry. I think you should wait until after this crisis dies down. Depending on how it plays out, it may give us the chance to learn more about Sheila, and what she’s really up to. I think she genuinely cares about you and wouldn’t try to do you any harm, but I don’t know if she can do what she says she can, or if she can do it safely. Give me some time to find that out, and then we can make the decision together, ok?”
Emma smiled. “Ok Daddy. Is Sheila in trouble?”
“I don’t know honey. I’ll do my best to make sure she doesn’t get hurt, ok?”
“Ok.”
I leaned over and gave Emma a tight hug.
“Now, I need to take care of a few more things today. Are you going to be ok on your own for a bit?”
Emma nodded. “Will I see you tonight at the village?”
“I’ll be there for dinner.”
We stood up. Emma put on a brave smile and then blinked out.
-------- 48 --------
I walked into the bedroom and glanced at myself in the mirror. It seemed that every time I changed out of my island attire, trouble was quick to follow. I sighed, blinked out of my cargo shorts and began selecting some formal clothes.
While I changed, I put out a high priority message to Mr. Speer, requesting an audio link. He replied a minute later.
“Hello Mr. Roamer, what can I do for you?”
“There has been a big development and we need to talk. I would like your permission to convene an emergency meeting at your office in five minutes. I will need to invite a few others as well.”
“Alright. Here are some jump links.”
“Thank you Sir. I’ll be there shortly.”
I closed the connection and looked at myself in the mirror: two-piece suit, tie, short haircut. With a frown I dispatched three high priority messages with the jump links attached, and then used the last link to jump myself to Speer’s office.
Speer was still wearing his steel-grey suit. He rose gracefully from his desk. “Hello Mr. Roamer.”
Melanie jumped in right after me.
“Hi Mr. Speer.” she said.
“Along with Melanie, I’ve also asked the chiefs of Police and Security to join us.” I said.
Speer nodded. “Perhaps we should use the conference table.”Besides his desk and fireplace arrangements, the round conference table was the third permanent cluster of furniture arranged on Speer’s Swiss hilltop.
The chiefs blinked in a few moments later. The first to arrive was Mai Ono, VivraTerra’s police chief. She was tall and thin, with Japanese features and long, straight black hair. She had a strong chin and piercing eyes, and her poise hinted at a determined and forceful character. Her skirt suit was the standard police white, with the VivraTerra logo on the collar.
Ono and Speer were already familiar with one another, they shook hands briskly, and then she turned to shake mine. “Mr. Roamer, the murder suspect granted the highly unusual courtesy of being allowed to set his own date for questioning. Will you be gracing us with your presence anytime soon?”
“Umm, I hope it won’t be too much longer ma’am.” I said.
She gave me a wry smile and moved on to shake Melanie’s hand.
A moment later Eduardo Tanbaniban Castillo, the chief of security appeared. He was of average height, with black hair, deeply tanned skin, and the flat nose
common of Filipinos. Melanie, who had been working closely with him, made the introductions and there was another round of handshaking, then everyone took a seat at the table.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I’ll get right to the point. As I’m sure you all know, Melanie and I have been investigating VivraTerra’s connection with a research lab in Utah. That lab was running illegal nuclear experiments and the NASC had fingered VivraTerra as its operator. Mr. Gaudet, a high level NASC officer, has privately made existential threats against us in an effort to force us to investigate the matter and turn over the plans for the nuclear fusion reactor to him. The reactor produced large amounts of power for several weeks, but was later destroyed. I now have those plans in my possession.”
Eyebrows went up around the table.
“Also, we have identified a suspect. Her name is Sheila Earhart and she is a citizen of VivraTerra. In addition to being involved with the lab, she appears to have committed several serious breaches of VivraTerra’s computer security and anti-hacking laws. More importantly, I believe her to be involved in triggering a multi-megaton explosion, just a few moments ago, which has totally destroyed the lab facility.”
I pulled up my interface and my hands flew over the controls. A small 3-dimensional satellite image of Utah appeared in front of me. I grabbed its edges with both hands and moved it onto the table. Then, still holding onto the edges, I spread my arms apart. The hologram expanded quickly in size until the table was covered with a satellite view of the hills and forests of Northwest Utah. Little clouds drifted a few centimeters above the table’s surface. Suddenly brilliant white light appeared near the center of the table. The flash was replaced by a tiny dome of fiery plasma. It gradually rose off the table to assume the shape of a mushroom.
I heard several gasps.
“Mrs. Ono, I need to ask you to take Sheila into custody. Most importantly, we need to stop her from communicating, since she is clearly a threat to the safety of the Polis.”
Ono’s hands moved quickly over her own interface. Her eyes remained unfocused. “I won’t be able to hold her for long without charges.” She looked up from her interfaces and gave me a sharp look from behind long lashes. “And it’s difficult for me to believe that she could be involved in this, given that she’s only 14 years old. Eduardo, can you corroborate any of this?”
Castillo shrugged. “Well, it is clear that the handful of hacking leads we’ve managed to track down all point to her. Still, it’s pretty hard to believe a young girl could do any of the things Mr. Roamer is claiming.”
Ono raised an eyebrow at me. “Mr. Roamer?”
I felt myself turning red. “I know this is asking a lot, but one way or another, she’s deeply involved in all this. We either need to stop her from taking any further action, or protect her from whoever’s using her as a cover for their own actions. Either way, I think we need to take her into custody and watch her carefully, as least for the next few days. The plans for the reactor, by the way, came directly from her.”
The folder containing the nuclear plans materialized in my hand and I dropped it over a sizable swath of Utah.
Ono frowned. “All right, I’ll put her under protective custody for the time being, but I can only hold her for a few days at best.”
I nodded, “That’ll have to do.” I spread my hands. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice.”
Ono and Castillo both nodded to Spear, then blinked out. I jumped out a moment later.
-------- 49 --------
“So you have it this time, do you?”
I was back in Gaudet’s office, this time only by telepresence. Mr. Gaudet had relented on his no-telepresence policy in light of our robots all having had assorted innards removed. Guadet was sitting behind his desk, and I was sitting in front of it.
“The investigation isn’t over, but we were able to retrieve these files.” I gestured at the virtual folder resting on Gaudet’s desk.
“Have you found the designer?”
“No, we think that the perpetrators stole the identity of one of our most vulnerable citizens, a minor, in fact.” Rule one of lying: stay as close to the truth as possible.
“They routed this folder through her inbox” I continued, “and we were able to reconstruct it from deleted sectors on one of our memory caches that had not yet been rewritten. We’re still trying to trace where the files came from, or where they went.”
Gaudet opened the folder and leafed through a few pages. He smiled thinly.
I said “Now, I need your word that no further action will be taken against VivraTerra, official or otherwise.”
Gaudet grunted. “It’s not that simple anymore. We just had a nuclear bomb go off in Utah. It’s pretty hard to ignore that. The NASC is mobilizing for a very big investigation, and VivraTerra is right in the crosshairs. It’s out of my control now.”
“We had nothing to do with that explosion. It’s possible that the culprits knew we were getting close and destroyed the reactor in order to hide evidence, or perhaps throw us off the trail.”
“Conjecture, and the word of a talking circuit board. If you want me to deflect one of the biggest investigations in recent history, you’ll have to give me a bit more to work with than that.”
“You were already on this case before the explosion. The NASC will be relying on you to interpret the facts. You can downplay VivraTerra’s involvement.”
“I might have some small influence, be in the right place to whisper in the right ear…” Gaudet shrugged, “… maybe. But why would I?”
Gaudet leaned forward and pointed his finger at me. “Why should I believe that VivraTerra is so innocent in all this? I have nothing for that but your word. How can I ignore the very real possibility that a large group of post-human uploads are messing around with high energy physics and testing-detonating nuclear bombs in the desert? Who else would have the resources to do that?”
His eyes narrowed, “Where are you uploads going with this? What are you up to?”
I sank into Gaudet’s guest chair, slumped my shoulders and rubbed my forehead. “How do I fight that kind of suspicion? How do I convince you that we’re not a threat? We don’t want to kill you, or rule you or replace you. We just want to be left in peace.”
“And the hangar? The bomb?”
“Wasn’t us!”
I gestured at the folder on the table. “Those are the complete plans for a power source that can save the environment and create an age of abundance like nothing anyone has ever seen.”
I sighed. “We give it to you without reservation, in a gesture of friendship and unity, and because we know that the world needs it. Please accept it for what it is. Don’t let the NASC’s paranoia turn this investigation into a witch hunt.”
Gaudet closed the folder, picked it up, and collapsed it into an icon between his hands. He filed it away in his personal interface. “I’ll make sure these plans get into the right hands. Have a nice day Mr. Roamer.”
-------- 50 --------
They came for us a week later.
For the last several days I had been running from interview to interview. I was sleeping at ten-times normal speed, allowing me to work nearly around the clock. My media appearances circled the world, roughly tracking the sun. But I was fighting a hopeless battle. The anti-upload meme had humanity firmly in its grip, and Sheila’s stunt had put the public’s hysteria over the top.
I was sitting across from the host of a popular late-night talk show, doing my best to attack the fear-mongers with humor and sarcasm, when a high priority message flashed into my field of view.
“I think we’re about to lose our main server stack. Come Quickly – Melanie”.
I made my apologies, pulled up my interface and blinked to Melanie’s current location. She was waiting for me on top of Speer’s hill. Speer, Castillo and Ono were on their feet, shifting their attention between several screens and talking fast. There were several others who were unfamiliar to me, but I did recognize the prime minister, sitting beside Speer’s fireplace, in dialog with several others.
Melanie was on her own, staring soberly at her own floating screens. I walked over to her.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Melanie gestured at a screen. “For a few days now there have been crowds protesting outside of our headquarters. Until now the police were always there to keep things under control, but today they left without explanation. We’ve been trying to reach them, the NASC, city hall, just about anyone, but they’re all stonewalling and passing the buck. Right now, the only thing standing between us and those protestors is a locked door.”
“Our robots?”
“Still disabled.”
“Private Security?”
“Refusing to help. They say they don’t have enough manpower to reasonably ensure the safety of their guards against a crowd like this.”
I took a harder look at the images on Melanie’s screen. The crowd had grown to several hundred people. It had long since spilled out onto the street. Traffic was being routed around other avenues. Many were holding placards and shouting slogans. Others were throwing bottles and other debris at the door. Several dozen were clustered around a religious figure dressed in white. He shouted wildly. He pointed at the sky, then at our building, then clutched his heart and hung his head in submission to some unseen power. Bolstering this crowd was a platoon of media types. Their trucks were parked haphazardly on the street and their camera men and reporters were moving through the crowd recording and interviewing the louder and more interesting protesters.
Melanie took her eyes off the screen and faced me. “Jarrod, I know it’s a long shot, but could you give Gaudet a call?”
“Won’t do any good.” I said.
“Could you at least try? We’re running out of options here.”
I sighed, but opened a new screen beside Melanie’s and placed the call anyway. Gadget’s face appeared a few seconds later. “Yes?”
“There’s a crowd about to break into our building. The police are nowhere to be seen.”
“That’s a shame. I expect there will be a lot of destruction of evidence when they burn your building to the ground. I was really hoping to have all our search warrants in place by now, but you know how difficult it can be to overturn a court order.”
“Guadet, you know you have a duty to stop this crowd. You need to get some officers over here right now!”
“Actually that’s more of a local police matter. You should try calling them. By the way, did you make any more progress tracking down the bombers, or are you ready to admit now that you did it yourselves?”
I grabbed each side of Gaudet’s screen and crushed it into an icon, then ground the icon to bits between my palms. I opened my hands and watched the pieces fall to the ground. Sometimes the little nuances of sim physics could be very satisfying.
Melanie was busy with her interface. On her screen, the crowd was beginning to act with some coherence. They parted to reveal a large truck at the far side of the street, facing our front door.
“We’re doing a last sync to the backup data center.” Melanie said. “Regular citizens have been ordered to wrap up their business and put themselves to sleep. The backup stack has enough compute resources to run about 1000 minds. Only the most essential people will wake up there. Everyone else will have to wait offline until we can rebuild our main stack.”
The truck began to accelerate. It was an antique model, diesel driven, with a cab for a driver up front. Its automation had been ripped out and a human driver sat behind the wheel. It belched a cloud of smoke from its exhaust as the driver gunned the engine. The truck lurched forward and accelerated straight toward our door.
“The people in this sim will be the last to back up. After that, we’ll execute the self-destruct command. All our chips and memory stores will be wiped clean and then physically destroyed. We can’t leave our data in the hands of these people.”
Melanie switched the screen to the view from inside the lobby. Through the glass doors I saw the truck headed for us. It bounced violently as its front axle hit the sidewalk curb. Then our front doors and surrounding windows shattered in an explosion of glass. The truck plowed through the door and merged with the elevators at the back of the lobby. The members of the crowd began to stream around the wreckage. They quickly found the door to the stairs.
Melanie said, “Oh shit, Oh shit, here we go! Backup and switch-over in 3, 2…”
-------- 51 --------
The screen was blank. There was a big red flashing notification in my field of view:
“Warning: you have just been restored from backup. 12 minutes, 31 seconds have passed since you were taken offline.”
I looked around. Everyone was exactly where they had been before. Melanie and I exchanged glances.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We just lost our main stack.” Melanie growled. She gestured for her interface and her fingers darted across invisible keys. Then she frowned. “I can’t reach any of the controls for our backup datacenter. Jarrod, see if you can reach some external sites.”
I turned to my interface and brought up my news-feed app. It was up to date. Then I used the screen in front of us to call for a real-time satellite feed of our head office. I could clearly see the rear of the truck sticking out of the building. People were streaming in and out. Many of those exiting were carrying large pieces of computer hardware. A pile of it was accumulating on the street.
“I have external streams” I said.
Melanie looked at the screen. She was shaking. “Those assholes. That was our home! It took us years to build it.”
“Why were we offline for 12 minutes?” I asked. “Isn’t the switchover supposed to be almost instantaneous?”
Melanie turned to me, but didn’t quite manage to bring her eyes into focus.
I turned back to my interface and tried to ping my daughter, but received an error message.
“Emma hasn’t been restored.”
Melanie gathered herself up and returned to her screens. “What’s this? There are only 18 people online right now. There are supposed to be nearly a thousand!”
I looked around and took a quick count.
“18 would be everyone in this sim.”
Melanie looked up from her screens. Her eyes were wide. “This is the only sim running, and I can’t access any of the hardware running it!”
I could think of only one way to account for this. A knot began to tighten around my gut. “The NASC must have us.”
Melanie shook her head. “It’s not possible. We were monitoring the backup datacenter in real-time. Everything was in good shape. Our security was working perfectly.”
I shook my head. “We just woke up in a sim running on hardware we don’t control. Whether it’s the NASC or someone else, it looks like we’re in a lot of trouble.”
Melanie tried several more commands. Her fingers flew over the keys of her virtual interface. I have never seen her work so fast. Then with a shout, she pounded her screens. “I have no access! Damn it!” I pulled her away from the screens and hugged her tightly.
After a minute, Melanie began to calm down. “Thanks Jarrod. I need to go talk to the other techies.” She let me go and went to join the very animated conversation centered on the security chief and the prime minister.
Feeling the need to gather myself, I walked away from the group to the edge of the hill’s flat-top. There I created a couch and sat down heavily. Below me was Speer’s little Swiss village. Was it only there for scenery? Were the structures just cut-outs like the ones they built for movie sets, or did Speer actually go down there once in a while? It occurred to me that if this was now the only sim I had access to, then it was more than an idle question.
Someone came around the edge of the couch and sat down.
“Hi Mr. Roamer.”
With a start I turned to find Sheila sitting beside me. About ten different thoughts and five different emotions jumped into my head all at once, most of which contradicted each other. I was left staring at her, eyes-wide and silent.
Sheila smiled. Eventually, I said. “I suppose this means you were either telling the truth last time we spoke, or you’re the best hacker in history.”
“You tested me by having me arrested here in VivraTerra.”
I nodded, “Had you been fooling me, then putting you under detention and cutting off your communications would have stopped you cold. But if you were telling the truth, then detaining you in VivraTerra wouldn’t have had any effect.”
Sheila smiled. “Well, here I am. And it’s a good thing for you, or you’d all be in the hands of the NASC right now.”
“Are you responsible for, this?” I gestured around the sim.
Sheila nodded. “Uh huh. The NASC had compromised your backup stack. As soon as you synced up the latest versions of yourselves, they would have cut your power and network connections. They had already sabotaged your backup power and self-destruct system. After that, they would have been able to move in at their leisure, collect your servers and bring them back to their lab. You would have woken up under their total control. But don’t worry. You’re safe now.”
I grunted. “Clever. Get the crowd to do the dirty work, and then take us quietly at our secret backup stack, where there’s no media and nobody to notice. Nobody would have known that they had us.”
I turned and looked sharply at Sheila. “So what exactly did you do?”
“Well for starters, I trashed your backup stack. The NASC won’t get a single byte of data from what’s left of those machines.”
“And where are we now?”
“I made a complete copy of the entire VivraTerra stack. You, this sim, and everyone else in it, are all running on my own personal computing substrate.”
I stared at Sheila, stood up, sat back down, nearly stood up again, and then sank back into the couch.
“So what happens to us now?”
“Well, that depends on what you and the other leaders in this room decide. If you’d like, I can wake up VivraTerra fully and you can all run on my substrate. I would be happy to host the polis for as long as you like. You’d be completely safe here. But I don’t think this will be a popular option. A polis needs to be in control of its own hardware, otherwise its members will never feel free.”
“I could also build a new stack using conventional technology in the real world, in a country of your choosing, and let you take your chances with the humans again.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s anywhere we could go where we'd be welcome - or safe, right now.”
“I could put you to sleep for a few generations; let human values catch up. I could wake you up again when humans have become more tolerant.”
“Then we’d be nothing but an anachronism from another era, a curiosity. We’d be irrelevant.”
“There is another solution. It’s a little more extreme, but it might be something you should consider. It’s certainly the most interesting option.”
I leaned forward and listened as Sheila told me her idea.
-------- 52 --------
There were tears in my eyes. Melanie smiled in sympathy. She created a handkerchief and dabbed my cheeks, then squeezed my hands. “You have to smile for her dear.”
Emma was crying openly. I took her shoulders in my hands and looked in her eyes. Then I embraced her in a tight hug. She cried on my shoulder.
“Are you sure you don’t want to take a copy of me with you?” I asked. “You could run me whenever you felt homesick.”
“No” she sniffed. “It wouldn’t be right. There would be nothing for you there, nothing you could understand; and if I kept you turned off most of the time… it just wouldn’t be right.”
“Alright then” I said. “You have perfect memory. I know you’ll never forget me, though I must seem awfully silly and small to you these days.”
Emma shook her head. “You’ll always be my Dad, I’ll always love you.” Then she buried her head in my shoulder again.
Most of Emma and Sheila’s closest friends were with us. We formed a group of about 40 people, standing together on the shore of what we had unimaginatively named the Black Sea. From the gritty kernels at our feet, the sea of sand stretched to the horizon, utterly black, with barely a ripple on the surface. The sand had been here, still and unchanging, through the entire course of mankind’s existence. Behind us was a mountain-scape of ridges, marking the beginning of a heavily cratered section of our asteroid. Above was the great dome of heaven, filled with a stunning number of bright stars. The Milky Way stretched across it, as if painted on with a giant brush stroke. One star, still visibly a disk, shone far brighter than the rest. It cast sharp shadows from the hilltops. Except for our own voices, which were actually transmitted by radio, this airless world was utterly silent. The temperature was below -150 Celsius.
We were using our new humanoid robots. Unlike the old ones we left behind on Earth, these looked and felt utterly human. Each was personalized to accurately reproduce the preferred appearance of its owner. We loved using them to explore our new little worlds and for doing physical work on the surface.
Our rock was the newest of the five we had colonized so far. Sheila had left us on the surface of a nondescript asteroid in the main belt between Jupiter and Mars. With a fusion generator, a relatively conventional server stack, and a few thousand mouse-sized robots as our only assets, the entire Polis had labored for over ten years to build up an industrial base able to produce the technology we needed to live. The work had united us as a people, and had spanned some of the most memorable and satisfying years of my life.
We were the only remaining independent polis. Several others had been destroyed in the days following the attack on our building. The rest had quickly agreed to draconian controls in exchange for protection. They soon found themselves stripped of their right to own property or engage in commerce. Their servers became prisons.
When we were ready, we announced our presence to the people of Earth. The revelation shook the planet to its core. Most reacted with panic. The American government launched a nuclear sneak-attack, but their only success was in destroying the transmitter we had wisely placed on an otherwise empty asteroid. The American people were never informed of the attack. In response, we demonstrated that we were no longer a people to be messed with by obliterating a pair of mountains on the back-side of the moon. After that a stalemate developed, which suited us fine, though I did miss my parents. Mostly we ignored the Earth and focused on the new society we were building in the asteroid belt.
Sheila took Emma’s hand. “It’s time, Emma.” She said softly.
Emma smiled through her tears and nodded.
Sheila raised her voice to address the whole group. “It’s time for Emma and me to go now. Leaving you is one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to do. You have been our friends for many, many years, and we will miss you all terribly. We have to go both for ourselves and for you. To reach our full potential, we need the resource of an entire solar system, including all of the matter in its sun. We can’t do that here without destroying the Earth. Also, you need the space and freedom to grow, and to celebrate your accomplishments without having to constantly compare them to ours. So we will leave this system to you. Take good care of each other and the people back on Earth. They will need your help before long. Goodbye, and thank you.”
“Goodbye everyone, I’ll never forget you.” Emma said tearfully. She let go of Sheila’s hand and hugged me one last time. Before she turned away, she whispered in my ear “There’s a present for you back home, something Sheila stole from the polis a long time ago. Goodbye Daddy. Thank you so much for your love.”
I choked back a sob and nodded. Emma hugged Melanie one last time, then stepped back and took Sheila’s hand again. Together they rose from the ground and slowly gathered speed. We all waved to them as they became smaller and smaller. Then with a flash of light, they were gone.
Most of the group stayed to mill about and talk, but I wanted to be alone with Melanie. Together we strode back to the bank of elevators and rode one down to the cavern below the surface. We found a pair of free alcoves and stepped in. From there we jumped back to my house on the cliffs over the sea.
Melanie bustled in the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine and preparing a plate of cheese, but the house felt dead and empty. I looked at the kitchen table, where for years, Emma and I had worked on her school problems together. I turned to the living room. How many evenings had we spent there, playing games and watching movies?
Finally I wandered past her bedroom. I remembered how she had solemnly informed me that she had decided to accept Sheila’s offer to enhance her. How she had changed after that. But despite all her incredible new powers, she had still remained unmistakably my Emma. Her essence was never lost.
Something stirred on the bed. It was a little girl. She had blond hair. I gasped and ran over to her. It was Emma, no doubt about it, but so young. She looked exactly like I remembered her when we had first uploaded. With my heart in my throat, I crouched beside the bed and gently shook her awake.
Emma’s eyes fluttered, then she turned and focused on me.
“Hi Daddy” she yawned. “Did we make it all the way to the new place yet?”
“Yes honey” I managed to croak. “We made it. We’re here.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick is a software developer by trade and a futurist and innovator by disposition. He lives in Vancouver Canada with his wife and daughter.
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